We hear this a lot.

“I sat in silence and the answer came to me.”

I believe there is truth in that. I also think we sometimes give silence a power it doesn’t actually have.

Silence can tell me a great deal about myself.

It can help me understand how I feel about something. What disturbed me. What I want. What I no longer want. What my intuition is telling me. It can strip away all the external noise long enough for me to hear my own thoughts clearly.

That is clarity.

It doesn’t necessarily mean I have the answer.

Especially when another human being is involved.

I can sit quietly and realise that someone’s behaviour hurt me. I can realise that something feels inconsistent. I can understand that I no longer feel safe, connected or understood in a relationship.

All of that is mine to know.

What I cannot necessarily know is why the other person behaved the way they did.

I might have a theory. I may even have very strong intuition about it. Past experience and pattern recognition may tell me something important.

Still, intuition is information. It isn’t automatically fact.

If the answer requires knowing what another person thought, intended, felt or meant, at some point information has to come from them.

That requires communication.

And communication only really works when both people are willing to seek understanding rather than simply defend their own version of events.

Maybe this is where real clarity actually becomes much bigger.

Know yourself.

Understand the filters you bring with you. Your experiences, fears, wounds, expectations, biases and patterns.

Then communicate.

Ask rather than assume.

Listen rather than simply wait to respond.

And be willing to discover that your interpretation may only have contained part of the truth.

Of course, the other person may not communicate. They may not understand themselves well enough to explain what happened. They may avoid the conversation altogether.

Then silence still has value.

It may not give you the answer to “Why did they do this?”

It can give you the answer to a different question:

“What does this experience mean for me, and what am I going to do with it?”

Maybe that is the distinction we miss.

Silence helps us hear ourselves.

Communication helps us understand one another.

And wisdom might simply be knowing which one you need.