When I was practicing Aikido (for a very short period of time) a very long time ago, what we did was a little meditation after the warm-up before going into techniques (I think it's called zazen?). It was there to clear the mind of any thoughts and I think it worked. I sometimes did it at home and I always found that my voice was comparably weaker after doing it. During meditation, you don't do much - you just stare, if your eyes are open. It was because of it that a very original fear/thought occurred to me. It's about language.
Only after reading a bit on language did I realize speaking is hard. I mean, you just learn it in infancy, so you never really understand how hard it actually is. The other day, while I was waiting on something, I saw a little girl chasing a dog, trying to feed it some crackers or something. She kept calling it 'Am'. What she was trying to say was 'Ham', but I suppose that's slightly harder to pronounce. In the absence of the word, she just imitated the sound it makes. Personally, I would have called it 'hau' - and I guess most people would. You have 'howl' in English, don't you? Dogs howl.
It takes a long time, if you are educated, to accept the idea that language and words evolved from the sounds that we imitated. All around us, animals and plants make sounds, and the wind, and water, and rocks as well. We didn't come up with nouns in a fancy way, we simply tried to imitate the sound a thing does to 'name' it. Some people on this big planet still have issues with language - and you can see how hard it is for them to speak. They speak from the abdomen, and they probably feel pain in the guts trying to get out sounds. It is so unnatural to them. You see, sounds travelled from the gut to the throat and later to the mouth - but that was a long journey.
So what is my fear? I thought 'If you meditate long enough, could you forget to speak?' The thing about speaking is that not only it is hard (which I always felt it to be, even if I am eloquent and if you get me started on a topic I like, say goodbye to your evening), but it's often so...pointless. Speaking of which - as far as I know, the guy who came up with Aikido didn't explain the techniques to his students, he just showed them.
I feel so comfortable in my silence I'm afraid I might actually go like 'forget it, they'll get it if I use gestures'. Hey, I could pretend to be a mute! I know of a writer who pretended to be crazy and had - in his words - 'a wonderful time' in the facility, among loonies (well, he also tried to fake his suicide to get rid of his wife, so he was slightly eccentric - or not?)… but then I'd have to learn sign language, which I really don't wanna. If I have to speak coherently, why bother learn *another* language, when I already know a few?
This is my fear. That one day, I'll just wave goodbye to eloquence and growl when I really have to. I think that'll be the day I learn German.