But to enter into it more deeply still, I recommend you take a peaceful time alone to watch the extraordinary and unique film, Into Great Silence, made in the Carthusian monastery of La Grande Chartreuse, in the French Alps. The film-maker, Philip Gröning, was allowed unprecedented access to the intimate daily life of the monks and the result is several hours of intense, concentrated, almost crystallised silence, within which everyday sounds and movements are highlighted so that we become aware of them as perhaps never before. Rain patters on to the grey slate roofs, snow creaks as it melts in the sun, a brother chinks a fork against a tin dish to summon the cats for feeding and cow bells make their tinny sound as the animals are let out to pasture in spring. There is the sound of scissors cutting cloth and a razor cutting hair, the wooden wheels of the cart delivering meals to the cells clatter along a passage, an axe chops wood. It is as if one had never heard these things before, as they reveal their small, subtle differences against the background of awe-inspiring quiet. 

Without an experience, preferably a regular one, of what it means to spend time in silence, we are impoverished and we communicate that impoverishment, and our slowly withering appreciation of the joys of quietness, to our children. Their nature, their very instinct, is to make a noise. The sound of a playground of primary school children or their chatter, like a flock of birds as a bevvy of them pass us by in the street, are among the most joyful in the world. Children want and need to move, to leap and jump, hop, skip and run. It is not in the nature of the child to yearn to sit still or keep silent. We must teach them how to do it and to be comfortable within and unafraid of silence, because those are human needs, as much as fruit, good meat, fish, milk, bread, love and tenderness, stories and songs. Silence nourishes an inner awareness and a deep though not uncritical contentment with self. In silence, we learn to feel happy in our own skins, we discover what our personal resources are for dealing with the problems, stresses and complexities of the world and how we can deepen and strengthen them.

If children do not learn to focus and concentrate in a pool of quietness, their minds become fragmented and their temperaments irritable, their ability to absorb knowledge and sift it, grade it and evaluate it do not develop fully. Reading a book quietly, watching a raindrop slide slowly down a windowpane or a ladybird crawl up a leaf, trying to hear the sound of a cat breathing when it is asleep, asking strange questions, such as, "Where do all the colours go at night?" and speculating about the possible answers — all of these are best done in silence where the imagination can flourish and the intricate minutiae of the world around us can be examined with the greatest concentration. If there is a constant jazzy buzz from which no one ever frees them, and which distracts and diverts until they are confused and then rendered punch-drunk by aural stimuli, children become unsettled and anxious — and life is an anxious business for them at the best of times. We are responsible for giving them the great gift of time spent in silence so that they can begin to understand and experience its healing properties and become aware that it will always be there for them to draw upon, if they are only taught how to find it. Once they have, they will never lose the longing for periods of silence or, when they have attained them, the enrichment they bring. We must not to deprive them of this as we have, though perhaps unknowingly, deprived them of so much else.