Speechless

I woke up this morning without much of a voice. I've been fighting off a cold the past several days, and I guess it finally caught up with me. I stayed home as I was pretty much useless at work -- hard to conduct telephone interviews in a whisper -- and spent most of the day in silence. It's been a long time since I was that quiet, and it was an interesting experience. So much of the past year and a half has been about me finding my voice, and overall I've made a lot of progress in that quest. But I think that sometimes I've gone overboard; sometimes I talk too much and too loudly.

I read Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter recently and there is some really lovely interplay in the narrative between the literal and figurative processes of speaking and being speechless. The book was a lot deeper than I expected, and I found myself identifying with the story in a lot of ways. I wonder sometimes if for me it will also take something tremendously momentous, or if it will simply take the better part of my lifetime for me to grow fully into my own voice. I suppose it's all tied up in figuring out what it is that I have to say as well. I've gotten very good at asking the questions. I am not so good at expressing the answers I think I've found. The words I need are ever and always more elusive.

Perhaps the missing step here is listening more, which is why the silence today was nice.