How Silence Moves Through Generations
Silence does not exist in a vacuum. It crawls in between conversations and hums in spaces.
To acknowledge such silences, I asked visitors to leave a question they have never asked, on my ‘Sea of Unasked Questions’ board.
Each question represents a wave in the sea of collective silence.
A lot of us are taught not to ask too many questions, and that some questions are risky territory. We learn to code the curiosity respectively. A lot of times, we don’t even realize we are being taught to remain silent. What we also don’t realize is that these silences of one generation shape the next generation.
Each of us carries silences that we inherited somewhere along the way. Unless we ask difficult questions, such silences will calcify into cycles of unresolved issues.
Some of the questions visitors put up are:
“Who decides the history?”
“Are we truly what we choose to be or what people make of us?”
“Who am I without the perception of everyone who knows me?”
“Can I get away from them while still being one of them?”
“If there was a life after death, would that change the way you treat the world?”
“How to get money without working?”
“Who am I without a story?”
“Are we living life to the fullest?”
“What’s living and what’s surviving—and which have I done more?”
“Do you really care what people think of you?”
I think these questions beautifully reveal the fault lines of shared silence: our doubts about selfhood, our inherited guilt, our curiosity about futures we don’t know how to ask for.
Each wave of the unasked question is a testament to the things we’ve been too frightened or polite to voice.
I think even anonymously engaging in such acts of writing breaks a pattern.
Like adding weight to silences, or perhaps letting it float. Giving it form, reclaiming it.
The point was not to answer these questions, or in any way go into a rabbit hole of attempting to answer them. The power lies within the unanswerability of these questions.
As you read them, you become part of a lineage of voices daring to ask.
How does silence move through your family?
What silence have you carried too long?
What happens when you cast it into this shared sea?
In releasing our questions into the open, we begin to unravel the silent cords tying us to inherited fears, but also tying us together.
And perhaps, in this gentle unraveling, we learn how to speak again, through reclaimed silences.