Aisha,

It's not an offensive question at all. The answer is that I've written on a lot of different topics and this is the one that happened to inspire me most recently. I was trying to communicate something subtle that I felt when I was traveling and had to navigate in a country where I couldn't talk with people much. It was like my brain became more active, and I started paying much closer attention to everything.

I tend to talk a lot and like most people when I can lose myself in conversation I find it easy to stop paying attention to the world around me. At the same time, the opposite is true, too -- writing helps me understand the world much better than if I wasn't writing. I was interested in exploring the contradiction -- why is it that being quiet helps me see the world better, but using words helps me understand it better? This article is one half of my answer to that.

The other half--on learning how to use silence to tear down the walls that we construct out of words--will have to come later.

Best wishes to you, and keep writing!

J