“We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy.” These words were written in the novel “The Notebook,” by Nicholas Sparks.

I have lived a good part of my younger lifetime avoiding moments and places where I had only to listen to the quiet that surrounded me. After all, I was and I still am a social person. Drop me into an interesting conversation and I’m a happy guy.

Teaching high school for 38 years afforded me no quiet time on the job, which I didn’t mind at all. It wasn’t until after my retirement, when I rose from my bed between the hours of 4 and 6 a.m., did I begin to enjoy the empty sounds of no dogs barking and no kids yakking. I liked the quiet so much, I searched for other places where I could spend the time with only me, myself and I.

Sparks said, “Silence is pure. Silence is holy.” He’s right in my book. An early morning fishing trip to the lake blesses me with spiritual time. There are sounds there. I hear the water lapping onto the shore, the occasional flap of an eagle’s wings above my head, and the rustle of the wind between the branches of the trees. Yet these are the voices of nature that quiet my mind. I do no thinking at the lake. I step on the brake to my brain and pause the odometer from the endless miles of thoughts that have run through the engine inside my head for the past six decades.

Mother Nature can turn her volume on and off whenever she pleases. My friend Brad, who died last year, had told me that he would drive his truck to the edge of a frozen lake in the middle of winter and turn off the key. “What a beautiful moment,” he said, “and what’s so beautiful is that there’s nothing - no sound of water running, no life anywhere, no color, too, just a wonderful picture in black and white, a perfect moment to feel your heart beat against your chest to remind you that you are alive and breathing for another day.”

For two years, I wrote my entire novel, “Upon a Field of Gold” before the sun came up. I listened to the voices of my characters speak onto the pages of my book. You see, when silence is louder than sound, you think clearly. Your imagination is on fire. You invent ideas that you could never do in the midst of the daily noise.

There are those moments in our lives when saying anything can never be as good as saying nothing. When I was an assistant varsity baseball coach, our team lost the championship game in the last inning when our catcher let an inning ending, third strike pitch get behind him, allowing the winning run to score from third base. While our players walked toward the bus, our catcher picked up the ball, walked back to his position behind home plate, and crouched down as if the game was still being played.

Feeling his pain, I walked up next to him. He paid no attention to my presence or maybe he didn’t know I was there. He punched his mitt as if he was waiting for the next pitch that would never come. I crouched down alongside him. It seemed like an hour then passed. The sun had dropped down below the outfield trees. We were still frozen together in our positions behind home plate. No words were spoken between us. When an athlete feels responsible for losing a game of such importance, not one single word of compassion can be helpful. Only the silence of empathy can speak through the anguish he’s feeling.

He finally got up. My knees hurt like a migraine headache as we climbed the steps to the bus. A heavy silence greeted him as he stepped toward a back seat. Its voice was shouting, “YOU lost us the championship!”

We never spoke about it. He graduated and that was the last I time I thought I would see him. Then one day, I was shopping in a grocery store and I heard someone behind me say, “Hey, Coach.” I turned and there he was. He shook my hand. “Thanks,” he said with a frown upon his face. He turned and left, leaving me standing there remembering that pitch he missed and those surreal minutes after the game I had spent with him.

I left the store and I thought there will be two things he won’t ever forget for as long as he lives. One would be that he’d never stop the blaming himself for losing that game. The other is not having to be alone in that awful moment.

Silence is a powerful form of communication. Sparks wrote, “It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking.” He said only the old can be content together with the quiet, but I think at any age, we can all appreciate its significance.

When we are hearing nothing, that is when the voices of silence are speaking. Listen to what they have to say. They will tell us everything we need to know.

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.