all the pain of a human life is caused by words, as is all the joy. we create words to define our experiences and those words bring attendant emotions that jerk us around like dogs on a leash. we get seduced by our own mantras (i am a failure...i am lonely...) and we become monuments to them. to stop talking for awhile, then, is to attempt to strip away the power of words, to stop choking ourselves with words, to liberate ourselves from our suffocating mantras.