Each day the average person has about 50,000 thoughts. Some researchers put that number at 70,000 thoughts per day. Is it any wonder with this amount of inner traffic we lose touch with our self? Is it any surprise that with over 100,000 thoughts between us and our partner each day, we have difficulty finding and making contact with each other?
With all the thinking go on, what chance does our heart have to breathe, feel, and experience life, no less make contact with our significant others? The crowded mind makes for an overcrowded heart with little room for ourselves and less room for anyone else. When we live such a congested life, how open, available, and loving can we be?
The overwhelming load of thought people routinely carry makes it common that couples find themselves living together as two strangers. In the noise and confusion most people live with, it is a wonder that relationships last for months, no less many years. It is beautiful that we can be as caring and giving as we are with all the busyness.
Reclaiming ourselves and our partnership can be a major challenge. Calming the thoughts and slowing down the inner traffic are the important beginning. Peace and quiet and enjoying silence can be a life-changing event, bringing us back to basics, the simplicity of just being including being together.
Many people complain there is already too much silence in their relationship. They are waiting for the wall of silence to somehow go away. They are hoping for their partner to open up and share. The truth is that it is not too much silence, but all the thought and feeling behind the silence that is closing down the contact. On the other side of the wall is everything but stillness. There is the backlog of complaints, concerns, worries, difficult feelings, lots and lots of thought, everything but peace and quiet.