{"id":329,"date":"2008-03-01T21:50:36","date_gmt":"2008-03-02T01:50:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/?p=329"},"modified":"2008-03-01T21:55:28","modified_gmt":"2008-03-02T01:55:28","slug":"john-francis-on-the-value-of-silence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/john-francis-on-the-value-of-silence\/","title":{"rendered":"John Francis on the value of silence"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Francis decided to stop speaking for seventeen years (one of only many remarkable things he&#8217;s done).  Here&#8217;s part of an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.grist.org\/news\/maindish\/2005\/05\/10\/hertsgaard-francis\/\"> interview<\/a> with Mark Hertsgaard, where Francis talks about the personal effect of his decision to stop speaking:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\n<b>Interviewer:<\/b> I&#8217;m going to read a passage from your book about your decision to stop speaking: &#8220;Most of my adult life I have not been listening fully. I only listened long enough to determine whether the speaker&#8217;s ideas matched my own. If they didn&#8217;t, I would stop listening, and my mind would race ahead to compose an argument against what I believed the speaker&#8217;s idea or position to be.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><b>Francis:<\/b> That was one of the tearful lessons for me. Because when I realized that I hadn&#8217;t been listening, it was as if I had locked away half of my life. I just hadn&#8217;t been living half of my life. Silence is not just not talking. It&#8217;s a void. It&#8217;s a place where all things come from. All voices, all creation comes out of this silence. So when you&#8217;re standing on the edge of silence, you hear things you&#8217;ve never heard before, and you hear things in ways you&#8217;ve never heard them before. And what I would disagree with one time, I might now agree with in another way, with another understanding.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Francis decided to stop speaking for seventeen years (one of only many remarkable things he&#8217;s done). Here&#8217;s part of an interview with Mark Hertsgaard, where Francis talks about the personal effect of his decision to stop speaking: Interviewer: I&#8217;m going to read a passage from your book about your decision to stop speaking: &#8220;Most&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/john-francis-on-the-value-of-silence\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">John Francis on the value of silence<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/329\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}