One of my favourite album covers of all time is an image that, on first meeting, I was almost too squeamish to look at. It’s Manfred Mann’s Earth Band from August 1974 and, for reasons that will make sense in a minute (/paragraph), it’s become a regular tool for when I’m coaching LAMDA Exams. The cover image is an ear, close up. It’s a fairly innocent-looking, pretty literal drawing of an ear from side on. But that’s not the problem, not the cause of the squeamishness. It’s what you almost don’t see at the centre of the ear which is the tiny, open mouth.
You don’t necessarily see the mouth at first, screaming out of the centre of what if you’re not looking carefully would be a perfectly normal dark earhole. But that’s what makes the metaphor of The Roaring Silence appear so literal, and I don’t just mean on the album cover.
I didn’t know then what spoke to me, what allowed the focus that comes of curiosity to float me above the fear/disgust reaction that would otherwise push it away. I wasn’t good at “things in other things”, as I described my squeamishness when looking at diagrams in science lessons where a panel seems to have been removed and you see inside whatever unfortunate organ you’re meant to be looking at. Art could be as bad as science, too: anything inside something else, anything where it shouldn’t be. But not this. Not once I’d looked that first time, and kept looking. Or, rather, listening to that ‘oh yes’ moment we sometimes get, when a truth drops quietly out of our cultural history and into our self-knowledge.
I think of that roaring silence, that mouth screaming out of that ear, not just when I’m teaching metaphors alongside other figures of speech to Grade 4 LAMDA students but when I’m coaching social media and public speaking to entrepreneurs, writers and artists. Because it’s so literal, that metaphor. That noise that roars when we start scrolling on our social media platforms does not begin in the digital world; that’s just the echo. That roaring is exactly what we do with our own silence. And if we don’t acknowledge it’s starting there, the echo gets to scream all the louder.
The most predictable way most of us are making ourselves unhappy most of the time is comparison. When making ourselves unhappy this way on social media, we’ll often cite what the people or posts we find there are “making me feel” or how “perfect” someone else’s life appears to us – and/or that that person is “trying to” make their life look perfect. We know that we don’t really know how someone else, particularly a stranger, is feeling; that we can’t genuinely be sure of their reasons, thoughts or feelings. But we fill in the gaps so creatively and generously from our own thoughts and feelings we don’t notice we’re doing it at all.
Rationally we all know the limit of our powers: that we don’t know how other people are feeling, even our closest friends and family. We might often guess right, but that’s done by practise of reading their signs. With life as with creative writing the hardest and most fundamental lesson is head-hopping doesn’t work. We know our viewpoint character’s thoughts, their emotions, the feelings in their body as well as their mind. Anyone who isn’t the self, though, we’re decoding. And we’re so used to it – decoding facial expression, movement, gesture, tone of voice – we can forget we’re not actually hearing thoughts or experiencing feelings.
It isn’t comparing ourselves that makes us unhappy but our failure to notice the creativity we put into it: not noticing that what’s actually making us unhappy is creative comparison; when we’re comparing ourselves with our fictionalised version of someone else. Filling in the blanks (i.e. that person’s entire mind and life) with our imagined version of their feelings, their thoughts, their intentions, their life. Making them a dream or nightmare version of ourselves.
So my new year’s resolution is to enter 2024 ears first: remember that album cover, hear that silence, and listen to where the roar is coming from. It’s not the sea we hear when we put the shell of social media to our ear, it’s our own blood boiling. It’s not the shell. And we get to choose what we do with that. We can speak the truths we have, celebrate the things we care about, offer the goods and services that if we didn't believe belonged in the world we wouldn’t be putting there. And be less afraid of silence. It’s not the number of ‘likes’. It’s the depth of the gradually growing relationships with the friends, colleagues, creators, readers, clients, coaches and customers and the connections that make us all more able to be the happiest versions of ourselves.
So this is my resolution, and whether you’re active on social media or not you are welcome to share it.
I’m going to listen to what’s making me happy, and prioritise that on my every platform. I’m going to listen to what makes me unhappy and ask myself questions about that with the same unconditional positive regard I use in every coaching session with every client. And I’m going to answer myself with unconditional positive regard too. Feelings are not shameful, they are not bad and they are not wrong. They are data. We listen to the data, we learn about ourselves. We give ourselves choice. It isn’t just a roar of noise.
So next time we get angry or sad or scared because someone else seems to be showing off or doing something better than we have or less well than we think we could, let’s sit with the feelings instead of scrolling past them. They don’t need the anaesthetic of busyness, of feeding the roar; they need the time and space of the silence to listen. We can always be better versions of ourselves – and nobody else is a better version of us. So let’s walk into this year ears first and see what we can hear.