A Silent Nighttime Moment

Last night I stayed late at the library working on my essay (I did get it finished, by the way). As a result, I was walking home after dark with no one else around. I had been talking to a friend for about half of the walk home, but I let him go to bed when I was just five minutes away from my apartment. As soon as I hung up the phone, I was hit by the profound quiet that was the world at that moment.

The thick layer of snow had muffled everything to the point of near-silence and the only noise I could hear was the sharp sound of a shovel against ice. After I turned a corner, even that became muted and distant. Oddly enough, when that happened, my thoughts cleared to the silence and I had to stop in the middle of the deserted sidewalk to catch my breath. There was something about the silence that was so beautiful and spiritual. . . It was awesome, in the original sense of the word.

As I was paused on that snow-covered sidewalk, the lyrics to "Silent Night" came into my mind. I thought about how, although there was no snow when and where Christ was born,  the feeling of that snow-covered eleven o'clock world must have been the same as the one that miraculous night. I believe that there was a profound calm. A profound quiet. Peace. The world knew that Christ's birth was something worth its reverence.

Our world today is never silent. There are constantly the sound of cars, heating and air systems, conversations, music. . . We are always surrounded by white noise and other distractions. I feel like it's becoming more and more rare for us to be able to connect to the idea of a silent night. But then the snow comes, blanketing the world in clean. It purifies, it protects, it creates an entirely different world where we can finally feel peace and quiet and realize for ourselves how special a silent night can be.