Enduring the Everyday with Relentless Persistence and Jaguar-like Grit
There are two kinds of silence. One is a hush that settles deep—a child’s head resting on your chest, a spouse’s hand in yours after a long day, the hush in a quiet chapel when sunlight pools on the pews. That’s the silence that brings peace. It’s the exhale after anxiety, the space where God whispers, “Be still and know that I am God.” You feel lighter in that silence, more alive.
Then there’s the other kind—the silence that hangs heavy in the house when words have run out but wounds remain. The silence after a door slams or when a spouse sits across the room scrolling on their phone, the space between what you want to say and what you’re afraid to say. The kind of silence you find in waiting rooms, in the eyes of someone who’s been let down too many times. That silence isn’t peace; it’s tension. And it erodes. Over time, it carves bitterness into your soul. It hardens into resentment. Eventually, it can hollow out hope, leaving only numbness in its wake.
Most of us don’t talk about this second kind of silence. We put on brave faces, soldier through, keep busy. But underneath, the tension gnaws. Psychologists call it “allostatic load”—the wear and tear that accumulates in our bodies and minds from chronic stress, unresolved conflict, unspoken fears. It’s the feeling of carrying too much for too long, of always being a little braced for the next blow.
It’s precisely in that kind of silence that grit matters most. Not the grit that makes headlines, but the kind that gets you out of bed for the thousandth time to face a life that hasn’t gotten any easier.
