Every night, as our heads hit the pillows, and our heavy eyelids droop to a close, and we enter into a world away from our own. We can feel the silence of a pin drop, something all our teachers dreamed of. Our thoughts run wild in a frenzy in a labyrinth. There’s no rules, no limit. Every possible idea is fair game. The only difference? In the quiet starlit night, under the silvery white glow of the moon, all the white noise is drowned out, to be replaced by a quietude, a sense of peace that you get as you immerse yourself in the deepest thoughts that have long plagued you, though they have no qualms about manifesting at other points of time.
Sometimes the quietude is the silence that you get in the aftermath of an unexpected revelation, a shock, a betrayal. A relationship, no matter whether friendly, familiar, or romantic, comes crashing down— a betrayal that rocks your soul. Or it is some recent event that did not go as expected – the pent-up emotions come back now. And sometimes, in the silence, the words left unsaid, questionable memories now fraught with this pain, surface, allowing you to truly reflect on what has happened. Then, as time passes, amid troubled tossing and turning and a losing battle against the thoughts that haunt your mind, you wake and sit on your bed, dazed. It’s a battle of wills, and you need only reflect on what has happened in order to move forward. And so you muster all the willpower that you can to get off your bed and confront those thoughts.
I quickly switch on the lights, ready to start the night. With a quick turn of the key in the lock, the swinging of the tote bag, dishevelled, I walk along under the moonlit path, blocking out the unnatural light of lamps. I walk to the open air theatre, at the heart of campus, under the moon and the stars. I can hear the thud of my belongings on the floor; I can see the distant silhouette of that one classmate who has made himself home at this sacred central corner since the very first night at university. Out comes the pen and the book, and out come the thoughts, flowing like a river, shining white like milk in the moonlight. It is at this moment that all the thoughts unapologetically, unequivocally strike. The moon and stars are the listeners, but the silence isn’t eerie – the songs of the crickets, the hooting of the owls, are their ways of engagement. Nature is always listening, even when you think it’s not. One can learn more about themselves, and come to terms with their own thoughts, on a silent night, a moonlit night, such as this. I sure did.
Picture Credits: https://in.pinterest.com/pin/199284352234575430/
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