It's Boxing Day today. It was Christmas Day yesterday. I observed a "Day of Silence" yesterday, for a change.

Year in and year out, I've been asking myself this question: When non-Christians celebrate Christmas Day, do they really make a distinction between this occasion and the New Year's Day? If they do, what exactly is the distinction? If they don't, what is the point of celebrating it other than "going along" with everybody else (and this everybody else includes many more non-Christians in the same state of mind)?

In fact, the Christmas festivity points to the need for silence.
In silence, we hear nature; in silence, we see nature; in silence, we witness miracles.
It was on a Silent Night that a miracle was born.

Miracles are born more often than we think. Sages that we know of have come and gone throughout history, but many more have graced this planet and left their marks, but we are oblivious to them, because what they have left behind are neither soundbytes nor iconic images.

It takes silence to experience their presence.

The commercial machinery has exploited, and worked in collusion with, laziness of the mind and has made the occasion "noisy", noisy with high decibels that hit the eardrum and noisy with loud hues that excite our sight.

People need this noise to feel they are alive. And it's important to feel VERY alive on an occasion like this, so we need a lot more noise.

But silence is uncomfortable, and increasingly so as we delve into it. Once we've passed a threshold, however, the discomfort disappears and we feel infinitely more alive than in any other state, because we ARE alive.