One of the most important lessons I’ve learned in my spiritual searching is that solitude and loneliness differ; they each mean different things.

Quiet has become a memory for the oldest people among us, entire generations living among us have had no experience of it. Silence has been driven out of our lives by addictive technology, noise pollution that is now epidemic, and a loud, intrusive, often aggressive, and noisy world.

We go nowhere without some corporation trying to sell us something, some hysterical pundit seeking to frighten us, or some mindless politician hoping to lie to us. All of them are loud.

There is no silence in elevators, out on boats in the water, at the beach, in our homes, in schools and offices, to and from work and recreation.

Walk down any city street and try to make eye contact with another human. Everyone is walking with earphones, staring at cellphones, talking to the invisible, talking to their watches and their apps. Noise is everywhere – restaurants, offices, bedrooms, living rooms, backyards, schools.

TV broadcasts without meaning or relevance dog us even while we fuel our cars.

Loneliness, I realized, meant that something was missing in my life. Solitude was a gift.

Solitude brought me down and into the center of myself, where I found serenity, hope, and some answers to the questions I had been asking myself all my life. I wasn’t missing essential truths; I was seeing them. They were there all the time. I just had to stop in silence and listen.

Day by day, I learned about truth and strength, and purpose.

The impact of this absence of silence, says Joan Chittister (and Thomas Merton, among others), is that we are growing accustomed to only listening to sounds outside ourselves. Look at the news and see where that is getting us.

We don’t have to think much; we often listen and believe anything we hear. And why not? How could I learn to think outside myself in the wider world if I can never go inside or myself? Politics is no longer about thinking or choosing; it’s about following without much thought or moral grounding.

My most precious hour is my silent hour – every afternoon, after work and lunch – where I turn off or disconnect from the tsunami of noise around me and all of us and just sit quietly with myself in silence. I don’t have words for how important this is and how beautiful. It has done so much for me.

Silence, to me, is the beginning of peace. In silence, I learned there was more to life than it offered me. There is truth and beauty and serenity of mine for me that only silence can reveal and discover.

I had a friend call me recently; he said he just needed to talk because his wife and family were visiting relatives away, and he found the silence in his house frightening. He sounded anxious.

He needed to hear a friendly voice.

I don’t give unwanted advice to people, but what I thought was the friendliest voice I have ever heard was me when I stopped spinning and looking outside for answers and began listening to me. I found almost all of the answers I needed to seek the life I wanted.

I thought that my friend was in a sad place. Without silence, he was unlikely to find the peace of mind he was seeking. How could he? The fear was coming from the inside, not the outside.

I went into myself to discover a world at war within the side of me and to end this painful conflict. Understanding and facing the truth about myself helped me see the world in a completely different way and come to terms with it.

I found peace.

That is my addiction now.