Once,
I stopped talking,
For a week.
*pauses to allow for comments from the peanut gallery.
It's true. Ask Dave Orosz; he was there.
All my friends know that I talk WAY too much - always have. Sometimes my inner voice is telling my outer voice to shut the fuck up. I get it. Of course I get it! Do you think a guy that weighs 400lbs is unaware that he is overweight?
So one day I woke up and decided to conduct an experiment: I would remain silent for a week and see what happened.
Day one was a big deal. It was basically a daylong game of "charades". If my running off at the mouth all those years was intended to garner attention, I was definitely taking the wrong tack. Shutting my mouth brought me more attention in a day than I'd ever experienced prior to that.
"Are you sick?", "Do you have laryngitis?", "Is this a dare?", "How long are you going to keep this up?"
Someone asked if it was for spiritual reasons and I realized the answer was "Yes.".
It was 1987. I was a Lance Corporal in the Marine Corps, stationed in Okinawa, Japan. I was a computer operator and worked with mainframe IBM computers. It was like working in a civilian facility only everyone who worked there was dressed in military garb.
My colleagues clowned me for about half-a-day, after which my choice to remain silent was treated with reverence and respect by virtually all my friends, colleagues, and superiors.
During that week, I could imagine a life unspoken.
Or, at the very least, until I actually had something to say.
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