Consider the following comments on silence.
We fill every silence with sound because silence is where the unwelcome thoughts finally speak.
There is a silence that joins two people and a silence that quietly ends them.
Some things can only be said in the absence of words, and some only in their refusal.
Silence is a true friend who never betrays.
Confucius
The hardest silence to keep is the one that protects someone other than yourself.
Write a reflective piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your thinking and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
A reflective thesis is that silence is never simply empty, and that the same stillness can hold peace, avoidance or cruelty depending on what we are refusing to say. Open with a particular silence, the comfortable quiet between people who trust each other, or the heavy pause when something true went unspoken. Then work the tension: silence can be the deepest form of presence, a being with someone beyond words, or it can be the abandonment of a person who needed us to speak. A useful structural move contrasts the silence we choose, a retreat that restores us, against the silence imposed on us, by fear, shame or a culture that would rather we said nothing. Caution: avoid the easy lesson that silence is always wise or always peace, since some silences are complicity, and the honest reflection admits how often we have hidden inside one.