The Importance of Showing Up—Zero Words, Single Presence

Two fish at Colasanti's Tropical Gardens sitting with each other.

There is so much noise in everyday life that we have forgotten how much significance pure silence can hold. In times of need you likely won’t remember what was said to comfort you, but rather who was there quietly wallowing in your pain with you. 

When someone is upset, grieving, overwhelmed, or even just having a bad day, most of us can only remember how bad we are at comforting people. We think through possible responses in our heads, searching for the least insincere thing to say, which is always the verbal equivalent of a ginger pat on the back. Most of us want to be comforting. We likely remember that we can’t fix things, but we want to alleviate the pain that we notice another person experiencing. It’s human nature to want to fix things. But in the moment, there is never any one thing we can say to make things better. Think about the worst thing that happened to you; Can you think of a single sentence that would undo all the pain and anguish you underwent? Or maybe you remember the person, or the people, who appeared next to you and stayed silent, knowing that a measly “Sorry to hear that” means nothing. 

Showing up is one of the simplest acts of care, yet it appears to be a rare occurrence today. We live in a world where communication is expected to be constant, but presence is not. 

It’s easy to feel sympathy from afar such as a muttered “I hope they’re okay…” to yourself. It is much harder to join someone in their pain, to make the decision to be next to them and take the emotional weight off them using exactly zero words. That’s the most important part. 

Sometimes showing up means sitting beside a friend while they cry without thinking that the silence between their sobs is an invitation to speak. Sometimes it means beating the same dead horse for the fifth time in three hours because they are still trying to make sense of what happened. Sometimes it means sending a message that simply says, “Hey, I noticed you seem kinda down… is everything good?” even when you have not spoken in months. 

We tend to think that there is an expiration date on concern. If we haven’t talked to someone in a while, it’s awkward and weird to text them out of nowhere again. If you’re not particularly close with them, then it’s safe to assume that it’s not your place to be concerned, right? If we have never really spoken before, we convince ourselves that someone else will handle it. 

Human beings are social creatures. There are loads of people that like to let on that they’re lone wolves who don’t need anyone for anything, and while independence is fine, no human is nearly as self-sufficient as we like to pretend. Humans need community. The village is not only there to raise a child, each person looks out for one another, and that includes the adults that are struggling in strangling silence. 

When you are at your worst, you will not remember the words you heard, but you will always remember the faces you saw, staring back at you.