Can You Hear the Silence?

The Night the Noise Stopped

One night, after a long day of conversations and the low, relentless hum of ordinary life, I stepped onto the terrace alone in silence.

The ceiling fan stopped. The almost invisible sound of electricity running through the walls — that background hum we never notice until it disappears — vanished completely. And in that sudden, unexpected emptiness, I heard my own breath.

Not as something familiar. As something almost foreign. As if it belonged to someone I had not visited in a very long time.

I sat there without moving, surprised by my own presence.

That was the moment I understood, in a way no book had ever quite explained to me, the difference between hearing and listening.

Sometime after that night, I was sitting with a notebook and I came across something I must have noticed before but never truly seen.

The word listen and the word silent are made from the same six letters.

L. I. S. T. E. N.

Rearrange them, and one becomes the other.

This is called an anagram — two words built from the same set of letters, wearing them in a different order. The English language holds many such pairs. But few carry a truth as precise as this one.

I sat with that for a while. Not as a language curiosity. As a quiet instruction.

To truly listen, you must first become silent.

In Hindi, there is a word that holds this feeling more completely than anything I have found in English.

ठहराव.

English translates it roughly as “pause” — but that translation loses almost everything. A pause suggests interruption, a gap between two activities, a brief stop before the next beginning. It is functional. Mechanical.

ठहराव is something entirely different. It is a living stillness. The moment between two temple bells when the sound has ended but its meaning still moves through the air, still settles into the body, still asks something of you. When the world does not stop — but you do.

When you become quiet enough that the silence itself becomes present to you, like a companion you had not noticed was always there.

That night on the terrace, I was not in a pause. I was in ठहराव.

And it was only in that stillness that I could hear — not the world outside, but something closer and more essential.

If stillness as a language speaks to you, you may also find something waiting in Whispers in Stillness.

Hearing happens whether we choose it or not.

The traffic, the notifications, the television running in the next room, the colleague speaking while your mind composes your reply — all of it arrives, and we receive it passively, the way a wall receives light. We process it. We respond to it. But we are not fully present to it.

Listening is something else entirely. It requires an interior act that has nothing to do with the ears.

It asks you to set down your own noise — the waiting response, the half-formed judgment, the thought that begins with yes, but — long enough to let another presence truly arrive. Long enough to hear not just what is being said, but what is being carried beneath the words.

And here is what I have come to believe: we have become very skilled at hearing, and increasingly unfamiliar with listening.

We live in a world that rewards volume. Visibility goes to those who fill the air. Speed is valued over depth. Even our silences have become performative — a strategic pause, a considered delay, a moment of apparent reflection that is actually still about being seen.

Real ठहराव asks for none of that. It asks only that you stop. Inwardly, completely, without audience.

Ravana — the great scholar, the king of Lanka, a man who possessed every form of wealth, power, and knowledge — asked a single question at the end of the Shiva Tandava Stotram.

कदा निलिंपनिर्झरी निकुंजकोटरे वसन्
विमुक्तदुर्मतिः सदा शिरःस्थमंजलिं वहन्।
विमुक्तलोललोचनो ललामभाललग्नकः
शिवेति मंत्रमुच्चरन् कदा सुखी भवाम्यहम्॥

When will I find that quiet place near flowing water — where the noise inside me finally settles, where my hands rest in surrender rather than reach for the next thing, where my eyes, so long restless, grow still at last — and I have nothing left to say except one name, one breath, one presence…SHIVA… when will I truly be happy?

This is Ravana speaking. Not in defeat. Not in repentance. In longing.

The one who had conquered the three worlds was still asking — when?

Not how do I acquire more. Not what must I achieve next.

Simply — when will I sit in solitude, in stillness, with nothing between me and silence?

He did not long for another kingdom. He longed for the forest. He did not long for more power. He longed for ठहराव.

If the one who had everything could not find peace in abundance — perhaps peace was never there to begin with. Perhaps it has always lived only in the interior quiet we keep postponing.

And perhaps that is what we too are really asking, beneath all our noise —

कदा सुखी भवाम्यहम्।

When will I truly be happy?

The language already knew all of this.

Two words. Six letters. One is rearranged into the other.

Listen and silent have been mirrors of each other since the day they entered the language. Whether this is a coincidence or something more, I leave that to you. But I find it difficult to look at it as merely accidental.

It feels, instead, like the kind of truth that was always present, waiting only for the right moment of stillness in which to be noticed.

Rearrange what you carry. And listen.

There is a silence inside you that is not emptiness.

It does not ask you to produce anything, to perform anything, or to become anything other than exactly what you are in this moment. It is not the silence of absence. It is the silence of arrival — the quiet that waits for you beneath the noise of a long day, patient and unchanged, the way the terrace was always there, open to the night sky, whether or not you remembered to step outside.

If you have ever sat alone and heard your own breath as if it surprised you, you already know what ठहराव feels like. You were not absent in that moment. You were not wasting time.

You were, perhaps for the first time that day, entirely present.

And that is a form of listening too.

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What does silence feel like to you — as absence, or as arrival? Does ठहराव find a word in your own language? I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

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If this piece stayed with you, consider sharing it with someone who has forgotten that their stillness is also a kind of presence.

This post is part of a quiet trilogy. You may also wish to read:
Three Doors: A Story, Three Ways of Seeing — on perception, perspective, and the truth that changes shape depending on who is holding it.
Where the Question Leads — on being seen, being known, and the conversations that wait beneath the noise.

This piece is also available in Hindi on my blog अभिव्यक्त अनुभूति — click here to read.

© Anu Chandrashekar | CC BY-NC-ND 4.0