Throughout the pandemic, public commentators have been quick to draw historical analogies between Trump’s performance and past White House communications. The president’s televised briefings have been compared, often unfavorably, to Abraham Lincoln’s carefully crafted public addresses, or to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats. “D.J.T. is No F.D.R.,” one columnist opined.

The promise of “nightly surprises” for the RNC convention has, once again, encouraged political pundits to fixate on the rhetorical work Trump has before him. But while seeking sense and stability from the nation’s historic statesmen is only natural, the drive to find positive examples from the past distracts as much as it illuminates. Sometimes, presidential silence is most constructive for leading citizens through a crisis.

A case in point is a speech that President Kennedy considered delivering on civil defense. Drafted at the height of the Cold War but never presented to the public, this “fireside chat” would have explained what would happen if the Soviet Union launched a surprise attack against the U.S., with the goal of rousing Americans to build their own personal shelters against attack. The story behind Kennedy’s decision to remain silent reveals the enduring limits of presidential communication.

John F. Kennedy’s time as president coincided with a period of international relations often referred to as the nuclear crisis. Bookended by the surprise launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik in 1957 and the Cuban Missile Crisis and signing of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1962 and 1963, the nuclear crisis was the true high point of the Cold War. When Kennedy entered the Oval Office in 1961, the Kremlin and the Pentagon were engaged in multiple covert operations against each other. Spy networks hunted out military secrets, and cultural warfare was conducted through various media. The two nations also backed proxy conflicts across the globe from Cuba to the Congo.

An artist’s rendition of a basement fallout shelter, from the mid 1950s. As the threat of nuclear war began to feel real to Americans, many built protective home hideouts. Courtesy of the National Archives at College Park/Wikimedia Commons.

Nuclear weapons were at the heart of the Kennedy-era Cold War. Military strategists and think tank intellectuals—the people parodied and immortalized in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove—saw the proliferation of nuclear warheads as the best way to deter the Kremlin. These “wizards of Armageddon,” as journalist Fred Kaplan branded them, based their judgment on cold, mathematical calculations, and game-theory models of decision making with the aim to predict strategic interactions between the Cold War superpowers. This work led them to embrace a paradox: that more nuclear weapons could create stability; neither side, they argued, would risk attack because of the certainty of an equally violent response.

Mutual assured destruction (unironically referred to as “MAD”) had a tangible impact on U.S. military spending. By 1960, the United States nuclear stockpile consisted of 18,638 missiles, enough to destroy the world many times over. But nuclear war is equal parts foreign and domestic policy—and in 1961, Kennedy’s first year in office, managing public anxiety over nuclear weapons became a major political headache for the administration.

A series of high-profile international incidents turned the topic of Armageddon into water cooler conversation. April brought the public revelation of CIA misadventures in the Bay of Pigs, where 1,400 Cuban exiles launched a botched invasion of Cuba’s south coast in an effort to depose Fidel Castro. In June, during a conference in Vienna, Kennedy engaged in a tense exchange with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev over a continuing border dispute in divided Berlin, where a steady stream of emigrants fled East Germany for the West. Refusing to engage Khrushchev in an ideological debate or to guarantee citizenship status for fleeing East Germans made Kennedy appear nervous before the international press. Newspapers on both sides of the Iron Curtain ran stories about a young president “outmatched” and “underprepared”.

On July 25, 1961, Kennedy, still stinging from media coverage of his performance in Vienna, replied to critics at home and abroad in a televised public address in which he implied the U.S. might be willing to risk nuclear war over Germany’s fate and increasing Communist aggression. Staring directly into the camera, under the harsh glare of klieg lights, Kennedy told an audience of 25 million Americans that nuclear war was a real possibility—and that they needed to prepare.

The country had a “sober responsibility to recognize the possibilities of nuclear war in the missile age,” the president said, adding that neglecting to show Americans “what they should do and where they should go if bombs begin to fall, would be a failure of responsibility.” If a nuclear bomb fell on American soil, he suggested, families who were not killed in the initial blast or fires could be saved “if they are warned to take shelter and that shelter is available.” Kennedy affirmed his personal investment in helping the nation-in-crisis, promising “to let every citizen know what steps he can take without delay to protect his family in case of an attack.”

The speech, designed to wake listeners and call them to constructive action, was a disaster: Instead of banding purposefully together, Americans panicked. Previously, the public had been aware of the threat of nuclear attacks and the existence of civil defense—thanks to Federal Civil Defense Administration’s public education campaigns, featuring Bert the Turtle cartoons and duck and cover drills in schools—but apathetic about the practical ramifications of surviving them.

Yet after Kennedy’s speech, they obsessed over building protective shelters. Newspaper reports from the time described anxious families hounding officials at the Office of Civil Defense for information on converting houses, gardens and basements into nuclear bunkers.

The news kept raising new alarms. In August 1961, construction of the Berlin Wall began. A month later, the Soviet Union detonated a 16-kiloton bomb—codenamed “Joe 75”—at the Semipalatinsk test site in Kazakhstan, breaking an international moratorium on nuclear testing that had been in place for nearly three years. Over the next 16 months, the United States and Soviet Union conducted more nuclear tests than they had in the 16 preceding years. Global radiation levels spiked. The Cold War heated up. And thermonuclear war was becoming a real possibility.

While the total number of shelter assembly kits sold between 1961 and 1962 remained relatively low (Consumer Reports estimated around 200,000 were sold), the topic of shelters and survival became an editorial goldmine. LIFE magazine dedicated its September 1961 issue to the “fallout shelter question.” Public intellectuals from Margaret Mead to I.F. Stone produced stunning editorials on the damage privatized survival might have on the national character. TIME reported that some people openly threatened to shoot outsiders who tried to access their private shelter spaces—a strategy the magazine called “gun thy neighbor.”

After the July 1961 address, the Kennedy administration, realizing its misstep, started drafting a new presidential speech and preparing a new civil defense pamphlet, tentatively titled “Fallout Protection and You,” to deliver to every household in the United States. Modeled directly on Roosevelt’s successful Fireside Chats, Kennedy’s new address was intended to right the wrongs of the July message, providing a series of practical steps every household could easily take over the next few months. From September to late December, the administration worked tirelessly on the speech and pamphlet, a blueprint for the nation’s survival.

The task proved far more difficult than anticipated. The writers were dealing with tough content. “One conclusion is that any major nuclear attack on this country would kill tens of millions of people,” one proposed version of Kennedy’s speech stated plainly, adding:

There is no practicable program which would avert incredible destruction, slaughter, horror and chaos. The only way by which we could protect ourselves from the direct of blast, heat and firestorm is by burying our cities deep underground. We could carry out such a program only to the exclusion of nearly everything else in our national life—a course of action which makes no sense to me.

The proposed speech also made direct reference to the potential violence surrounding access to private shelters, with a warning given that “superpatriots” stockpiling private shelters should not “tyrannize their fellow citizens.”

Reading the various drafts, it is striking how honestly the issue of nuclear annihilation was addressed. White House staffers—wrestling with how to ask regular citizens to mount a civil defense with cinder blocks and concrete when there was no practical way for the federal government to do so—began to wonder if the whole exercise was entirely absurd. Some began to refer to the booklet as the “Fallout Is Good for You” guide. Fred Dutton, special assistant to the president, wrote in a memo that “the feel of the pamphlet, especially the drawings, is not reassuring. I suspect a poor public reaction to this.”

Dutton’s response was the mildest among Kennedy’s advisors. Senior White House advisor John Kenneth Galbraith criticized the Department of Defense for allowing some ridiculous ideas into early drafts of the message, including a bizarre reference to a wooden fallout shelter modeled after a frontier log cabin. Chiding the Pentagon in a memo prefaced, “I regard this as a matter of high importance,” Galbraith expressed concern about the political cast of the messaging. Privatized survival was a strategy designed for “saving Republicans and sacrificing Democrats … There are survival plans for people who have individual houses with basements in which lean-to fallout shelters can be built” but “no design for civilians who live in congested areas, tenements, low cost apartments.” The address in its current form, he continued, “seeks to save the better elements of the population, but in the main writes off those who voted for you.” Galbraith found the prospect of a presidential address on the matter “absolutely incredible and particularly injudicious.”

Ultimately, Kennedy’s advisors determined that the best solution, in the words of top aide and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen, was to allow the issue to “balloon” away—to “resist” Kennedy’s “natural urge to address the nation.” It would be better to leave the matter to other officials with greater knowledge, and less political profile. Spokespeople from federal agencies would still handle public inquiry, and local officials would work to identify existing public spaces that might be converted in community shelters. But direct communication from the president to the public on the question of privatized civil defense was severed.

There is much to glean from the tumultuous journey of this forgotten and abandoned speech. One crucial lesson is that the messenger matters. As public anxiety grew and the threat of nuclear warfare drew closer, Kennedy’s team came to realize that a presidential address would be unhelpful—because the public trusted experts more than elected officials when it came to their families’ survival.

In our COVID-19 pandemic, we can trace a similar response. As officials rush to reassure the public through an unceasing barrage of updates—muddling statistics and offering deeply questionable advice on using disinfectant in the body—they should consider whether their interventions, like Kennedy’s, result more in fear than faith.

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But once we find silence, how should we respond to it? Words demand skillful listening—attention both to detail and to the big picture, awareness of rhetorical trickery, sensitivity to emotional ambience, alertness to subtext. Silence is equally complex and also requires nuanced readings. Perhaps even more so.

For anyone attempting to make a serious study of silence, the obvious problem is that silence, by its very nature, is difficult to categorize. When he was only 14, the 18th-century poet Alexander Pope—not someone ever to be at a loss for words himself—wrote a poem about this very difficulty. In “On Silence,” the teenage Pope pointed out that silence is the refuge of both the wise person and the fool. Kindly silence is where “routed Reason” can retreat to safety—a dignified option when we feel the argument is going against us—but silence is also a cloak for “Dullness” masquerading as profound thought. Yet how can you tell whether someone who is silent during a discussion is a deliberating genius or a genuine dimwit? Or just somebody whose mind is on other things?

What kinds of silence are there, and how should they be listened to? At its weightiest, silence can be a political expression of pain and complexity, one that compels those who notice it to consider their responsibilities. In her essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” the academic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak tells the story of her unmarried relative, Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri, who, in 1926, hanged herself in British India, a notoriously restrictive society. According to Spivak, Bhuvaneswari killed herself because, as a member of a militant anti-colonial organization, she had been entrusted with a political assassination which she could not bring herself to carry out. Knowing that it would be assumed that she had decided to die out of shame over an illicit pregnancy, she timed her suicide carefully. When Bhuvaneswari killed herself, she was menstruating. Her body proved what mere words could not, because they wouldn’t have been listened to or believed.

In the age of social media, it’s almost reflexive to react to this silent act of testimony with outraged demands that people in similarly oppressed circumstances be advocated for, amplified, or otherwise enabled to speak. But this is not what Spivak counsels. Bhuvaneswari made her case in her own, very powerful way. It might be more helpful simply to curate such wordless actions, not trying to account for them but drawing attention to them and allowing them to resonate in the wordy cultures that surround them.

But what exactly would it mean to “curate” an act like Bhuvaneswari’s, without involving words of explanation? Talking about experiences brings people together, which is the beginning of political action. Some kinds of silence are oppressive, the opposite of empowerment. Silencing can be punitive; even—as Atul Gawande argued in a New Yorker article on solitary confinement—a component of torture. When we come across silencings, shouldn’t we scream the place down?

Or would a concerted act of group silence—a deliberate public silence—be more effective? In chapter 8 of the Book of Amos, the prophet describes a vision of the destruction of Israel. So many people will be slaughtered, God tells Amos, that their bodies will be brought out of the temples in silence. It is a prediction of a massacre too horrific even for the traditional noises of mourning, remarks Diarmaid MacCulloch. Amos is envisioning people traumatized to speechlessness, so grief-stricken that their lack of verbal reaction becomes something of massive weight. The political impact of such a weight can scarcely be imagined.

Emma Gonzalez imagined it when, on March 24, 2018, she paused in the middle of her speech at the March for Our Lives, until six minutes and 20 seconds had passed: the precise amount of time it took a gunman to kill 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Franklin Leonard, founder of The Black List, called it “one of the most remarkable political moments” he’d seen.

Emma Gonzalez, a survivor of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, pauses during her speech at the March for Our Lives rally in Washington, D.C., on March 24, 2018. Courtesy of Alex Brandon/Associated Press.

Silence, then, is a radical tool.

Not least, it is a route to understanding other people and other points of view. When Pope Francis invited South Sudanese leaders to the Vatican, he was bringing together enemies in a civil war which had left at least 400,000 dead. What did he think that silent reflection would achieve? A colleague of mine, a former headmaster of British Quaker schools, describes experiences that might hold the key. Despite not being a Quaker himself, he came to highly value the role silence played in school policy meetings. Opposing sides would come together and, after putting forward their views, sit in silence. Discussion would begin again and, if there was still disagreement, further silence would be kept. And kept and kept until compromise was reached, as it inevitably was. It’s possible that the silences worked in these instances simply by wearing everyone down: Let’s agree to anything to get this meeting over. But it’s also possible that the reflective opportunities offered by silence do begin to dissolve entrenched positions.

For other kinds of silence, the most appropriate response is likely to be individual compassion rather than political action. In Old Norse legend, Prince Sigurd’s death renders his wife Gudrun catatonic with grief. “Gudrun could not weep; she was so impassioned by the death of the young man,” runs Carolyne Larrington’s translation of the Poetic Edda. Centuries later, the death of another young man had a similar effect on his friend, the Poet Laureate-to-be Alfred Tennyson. When Arthur Hallam died of apoplexy at the age of 22, the 24-year-old Tennyson was devastated. For the next 16 years, from 1833 to 1849, he worked on a long poem about his grief. How can such sorrow be communicated to those who are not feeling it? In In Memoriam A. H. H., Tennyson drew a vivid analogy with the way the sea and rivers interact near the village in southwest England where Hallam was buried. Twice a day the mouth of the River Severn fills with saltwater from the Bristol Channel, and this has the effect of stopping the flow of the River Wye. “The Wye is hushed,” Tennyson wrote, “and hushed my deepest grief of all.” But the flow of tears brings relief, “I can speak a little then.” The very deepest grief of all, that is, is not marked by tears or lamentations. The very deepest grief is silent, and skillful listening to it requires sympathy and consolation.

Such sympathy and consolation may themselves be silent, for silence can arguably produce far deeper communication than words. Henry David Thoreau realized so much when he left his home in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1845, to live a simple life by Walden Pond. Conversing with his neighbor across the pond, Thoreau came to a conclusion about human interaction, “if we would enjoy the most intimate society with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to, we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we cannot possibly hear each other’s voice in any case.”

One can only feel for Thoreau’s spurned neighbor, but this observation about silence extends beyond other human beings to the wider natural world. Nature isn’t completely silent, as any walk in the woods will make clear, but to listen to those silences that do occur in natural environments allows us to become more attuned to the life going on around us. In a beautiful poem by the Pre-Raphaelite poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Silent Noon,” two lovers lie silently in a sun-drenched meadow. Above them, a dragonfly hangs “like a blue thread loosened from the sky.” The silence is nothing less than a love song.

Listening to such silences is a form of intimacy. In D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Lady Constance Chatterley and the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, make love outdoors “in the roaring silence of the rain.” But intimate silence is not only erotic. The lucky ones amongst us know what it is to have good friends with whom conversation is unnecessary. When such friends walk or sit in silence together, the effect is not awkwardness but easy comfortableness. Listening to such silences is effortless: reverie built upon deep mutual knowledge and trust.

If silence facilitates human intimacy, it is also, in various religions, the way to a closer relationship with God. In her Revelations of Divine Love, for example, the 14th-century mystic Julian of Norwich wrote that God is peace, and the soul is truly joined to Him when it is at peace in itself. Soul-peace is an absence of contrariness, all disturbing thoughts banished away. In the Buddhist tradition, “noble silence” is an internal state of peace, equanimity, and concentration. Such a state is not so much to be listened to as achieved, through skilled meditation. This is intensely private silence, to be listened to—if at all—with respect, awe, and humility.

Where do you find your silences? I find mine in the 12th-century church in the English village in which I live, where, despite being a secular humanist, I attend a monthly Taizé service. Between the simple chants and readings, we keep silence, watching the light shine on the whitewashed walls or following through the windows the waving of the branches of the trees. In these moments, I listen carefully to the silence and come away enriched.

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As an antidote to this madness, every year in mid-November, about 20 people from my church, First Lutheran of Venice, drive to Valyermo in the high desert to spend the weekend in another millennium. My church group includes life-long German Lutherans, converted Lutherans, lapsed Catholics, former cult members, and stray humanists who haven’t yet made up their minds about Jesus. We do not agree on every point of doctrine, nor do we agree on political and social issues. What connects us is our belief in a loving God and our need for community.

Our place of withdrawal is St. Andrew’s Abbey, a community of Benedictine monks who operate a non-denominational retreat house where visitors are “welcomed as Christ.” While at the abbey, we live and eat simply, slowly. Whether we speak or keep silent, it is with intention. We leave behind our individual selves and become reunited as a community. We are able to do all this because of the horarium, the daily schedule of the abbey that prescribes specific times for prayer, study, and community.

The monks’ hospitality is genuine, but the accommodations are not opulent. Two low cinderblock structures of 10 rooms apiece house guests, each room containing two twin beds, a desk and chair, a couple of lamps, a temperamental wall heater, and a small bathroom. Given that this is the desert, one might also expect to find some small creature in the room, annoying but not deadly. The majority of our time is spent in the lodge, with its massive stone hearth and abundance of comfy chairs, or walking the grounds of the abbey, awash in the yellows, browns, and reds of fall foliage, the grayish green of cacti and Joshua trees, and the purple of the surrounding mountains.

At most services, the monks sing softly and in unison as a reflection of their sense of community and humility. In a two-week cycle, they will sing all 150 Psalms to acknowledge the Lord’s presence in the natural cycles of life. Psalms are sung on a single note, rising or falling at the end of a line, and ending in a scriptural refrain that changes according to the seasons of the liturgical year. This gives the worship an ancient quality, and connects the singers to all those who have worshiped in this way since the early church.

After Friday night’s supper, we are greeted by Father Patrick, the subprior, who gives a brief history of the abbey for the first-timers and reminds us all of the horarium and the thinness of the guest-quarter walls. Father Patrick was raised Catholic but lost his faith as a young man. Years later, he felt a deep need in his life and came back to the church. After a retreat much like ours, he decided to pursue a vocation and was ordained at the age of 62. His story resonates with our group, many of whom lost faith and returned to it later in life.

The abbey gets very quiet after Compline, the evening prayers. In the years that I have been going to St. Andrew’s, I have succeeded in observing the “Grand Silence” exactly once and, even then, not for the full 12 hours. The purpose of our silence is to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit. It’s not an audible, get-the-straight-jacket kind of voice; it’s more like the voice of a wise mentor or one’s own conscience. This voice gets drowned out in the everyday busyness of life. Being silent for one hour or 12 doesn’t guarantee a profound revelation, but it is another way of slowing down the racing mind and obtaining peace.

As we adjust to the rhythms of the horarium, some of us are unable to unwind from our sea-level lives and appreciate the quiet, worries clinging to us like commercial-grade plastic wrap. It can be good to sit with that discomfort, the knowledge that you are one hot spiritual mess and the fear that everyone else knows it too. On the other hand, sometimes, you have to let your church group members in on the secret, so they can help you haul that trash to the dump.

Oblate Cemetery at St. Andrew’s Abbey in Valyermo, CA.

This cleansing begins with a morning service of praise called Lauds. Praise is simply being grateful for who God is, acknowledging his nature as Creator, Father, and Defender. It isn’t asking for stuff; the churchy word for that is “supplication.” The Psalms sung during Lauds are chosen because they address some aspect of God’s character. The final stanza of each Psalm is a variation on the phrase, “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” emphasizing the triune nature of God. As the congregation sings these lines, we rise together and bow as a sign of deep humility.

Our meals are served buffet-style in the large cinderblock dining hall with a vaulted ceiling and full eastern wall of stained glass in an abstract pattern. Breakfast is always eaten in silence, and dinner is silent until after a reading from the Lives of the Saints. The brothers are soft-spoken at all times, so we tend to be so as well. At lunch, the soup is ladled out by Brother Peter, who smiles as though this is an ecstatic oblation.

Brother Peter Zhou Bang-Jiu was professed to the original St. Benedict’s Priory in Chengtu, China. In 1952, after several years of persecution, the Communist regime expelled the European monks from China, closed the abbey, and threw Brother Peter into prison, where he remained for 26 years. He kept his sanity by writing copious amounts of poetry, which he committed to memory for lack of pen and paper. He rejoined the abbey, transplanted to Valyermo in 1984 and has served here ever since. His presence alone is a blessing.

The weekend officially comes to an end on Sunday morning, when we hold a private Lutheran service amid a stand of rustling white Aspen trees planted in 1954. As I drive the hour and a half back toward Los Angeles, I think about Father Patrick, Brother Peter, and all those who have journeyed with me and taught me about living a life of gratitude and humility. The purpose of the desert sojourn is to have intimacy with God, yet I find that I have gained greater intimacy with my fellow church members also. The challenge is to keep these gifts once I leave.

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It was in the farmhouse that I sat at midnight, alone, at the kitchen table, with a cup of tea and one of my favorite childhood books, Louis Sachar’s Wayside School is Falling Down, unopened in my grasp. At that moment – a rarity, if not functional impossibility – I had escaped the din of life. The follicles in my ears stood at rapt attention, trying mightily to search for the quietest of noises. But there were none. Everyone and everything slept. The frost kept critters at bay, and even the wind decided to rest for the night. Only my heartbeat stood between pure, unadulterated silence.

A slow sigh escaped my lips. Not a sigh of regret or exasperation or negativity. Just – contentment. I had made the long, difficult trip, trying to get away from my rowdy, peripatetic life. My future legal career is in Los Angeles. My friends are in Chicago. My Dad’s family lives in St. Paul. My Mom’s family resides in the farmhouse. My life is almost always a constant din, a racket both literal and figurative – from the unwavering traffic outside my downtown Los Angeles apartment to the constant voice in my head pushing me to achieve certain goals in my last year at law school. Getting away for Thanksgiving – or for any holiday – always presents an opportunity to escape the noise.

But it was not easy.

Traveling proved to be a loud logistical nightmare, starting with the flight: long security lines; new X-ray technology that broadcasts intimate details to airport security; travelers nervously glancing at their watches; constant messages blasting over the loudspeaker (“The moving walkway is ending!”). Passengers, in an attempt to avoid fees, shuffled aboard with bulbous bags only to find the overhead compartments full. The plane’s engines droned incessantly; what felt like days-old recycled air blasted from above.

The perils of travel, and the constant whirl of sound, were hardly limited to the airport. On this particular Thanksgiving, my circuitous route brought me from Los Angeles to Chicago for 36 hours, to my Dad’s house in St. Paul for a couple of days, and finally to the farmhouse in Owatonna, Minnesota, 80 miles from my Dad’s house. Along the way I connected with bits of my past. Chicago was a blur: seeing old friends, meeting new ones, eating Gino’s East pizza, watching a football game at Wrigley Field, laughing, yelling, cavorting. St. Paul involved my Dad, traffic, a Timberwolves game, and a movie.

It wasn’t until I reached Owatonna that I complete my journey to the place where I first began to find my identity. Of course, even traversing the 80 miles from St. Paul to Owatonna proved difficult. Freezing rain peppered the freeway and swirling gusts pushed my car from side to side. The wind howled through the imperfect window seals. Even here, in my car on a desolate Minnesota highway, 3,000 miles away from the fracas of downtown Los Angeles, noise permeated my world.

I finally made it. But the ever-elusive quiet would have to wait. My twin brothers, 12-year-old 6th graders, demanded my attention for most of the day. My Mom wanted to catch up for hours.  After a loud but gratifying day of video games, football, wrestling, and talking, I was spent and the rest of the house was fast asleep. I was alone. It was then that I sat down at the kitchen table with my cup of tea and Wayside School is Falling Down. That book, which I first read in grade school and have read countless times since, first introduced me through its series of eccentric parables to the notion of individuality and the conflicts it can create. I didn’t need to read it again – its weight in my hand was nostalgic enough. Instead I silently reflected on my trip.

The concept of home, like the quiet we all seek, is often obscured and difficult to find. Is home where you grew up? Where your family now lives? Where your friends are? Where your career is? As I sat at the table, a hardcover memory still unopened yet firmly in my grasp, I knew I was home. I realized it was not my physical presence in the house but the culmination of the connections I made during my journey, and the chance to reflect in the enveloping silence, that made the experience so rich.

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