“World Introvert Day” needs to be extended. I’m thinking “World Introvert Year.” It’s celebrated annually on January 2 as some kind of sick joke, I think.
We all know the extroverts are just too tired from the night before. They’ve simply slept in. It’s only quiet just like we like it because they haven’t or can’t get out of bed.
It is no payback for having to endure the small talk of these busybodies. One day of silence is no fair compensation. I’m owed more than one day of zipped lips and a respectable distance from my thoughts, please.
Do you have any idea how many meetings in my head I’ve had to cancel? Don’t answer that.
“Introversion– along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness– is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology,” Susan Cain writes in “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” She continues, “Introverts living in the Extrovert Ideal are like women in a man’s world, discounted because of a trait that goes to the core of who they are. Extroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.”
But I refuse to, and quite frankly, I can’t. It’s just not the way I was created. Two ears and one mouth, there seems to be a rule in there somewhere about proportionality.
I simply don’t have the interest or the energy to continuously engage in navel-gazing that passes for conversation these days. While I do enjoy listening to others, it is with the expectation that my auditory experience is meaningful. It’s why I despise small talk.
It feels contrived, forced even. Begun while we wait for others to arrive at an event, it comes off as insincere and, for me, a horrible way to pass the time.
It’s why I bring books with me. My purse must be big enough to fit one or two, at least. Proud hermit, books double as a good place to bury my head and avert my eyes from a would-be conversation partner.
Like Howard Thurman, I am on a quest. One of his favorite words, I am in search of something more meaningful and that’s not unusual for introverts. “The highly sensitive [introverted] tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic,” Susan Cain writes.
Now, I’m not asking for an award or a round of applause. I’m just asking that the world hush for a little while so I can hear myself and God more clearly. Honestly, I didn’t intend for the conversation to extend this long but I think furthering this point is advantageous.
“We have externalized our lives to such an extent that, more and more, the only real things seem to be what we can touch, see, hear, taste and smell,” Howard Thurman wrote in “The Inward Journey.” Yet, “the rule of God is within.” “We are most alive when we are brought face to face with the response of the deepest thing in us to the deepest thing in life,” Thurman continued.
So, I don’t want to hear one peep, would-be funny joke or rambling thoughts. I believe strongly that the words you seek will come to you in solitude, stillness, and silence. It is the way of interior exploration.
Feel free to “center down” at Thurman’s invitation. But if you can’t, will you at least try to keep it down? My earnest prayer is you would zip your lips out of respect for us who are tired of talking and, thus, in praise of introverts.
Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
