Came across a supposed quote from the ancient Chinese seer Confucius
“A seed grows with no sound, but a tree falls with a huge noise. Destruction has noise, but creation is quiet. This is the power of silence, grow silently”
It’s a striking passage, even if it isn’t actually Confucius. It reads more like a modern proverb shaped to sound ancient, but that doesn’t diminish the “hmm interesting” that it
elicited in me. What’s compelling is the metaphor: creation as quiet persistence, destruction as spectacle.
Silence is often where the real work begins. Seeds germinate in darkness. Muscles grow during rest. Ideas form in the long, uneventful spaces between distractions. Yet our culture rewards the loud moments, the announcement, the crisis, the collapse, the reveal, far more than the long, slow cultivation.
I’m sensing a kind of imbalance, we treat “noise” as life’s proof of aliveness, when often it’s the opposite. Noise can be a way to avoid sitting with ourselves. A buffer against the unfamiliar or the uncomfortable. A constant filling of the internal space where creation could be taking shape.
The invitation in that quote is simple and subversive:
What happens when you step out of the current? What grows when nothing is pulling on you?
Silence isn’t the absence of life, it’s just a different home for it.
There’s also a beautiful paradox: when you allow yourself some quiet time, you often start to notice the subtler noises you’ve been drowning out, the hum of your own thoughts, the way ideas drift into awareness and dissolve, the raw texture of attention itself. That’s where things begin.
I wonder do my Cousin Andy White’s songs begin in silence? My stories do, silence is the space my words dance in.
If you followed the quote’s advice, if you went silent for a while, what kind of creation do you imagine might rise from that?