When John Francis first spoke after choosing not to for 17 years, he didn't recognise his own voice.
He looked around to see who was talking, marvelling that, "There's someone behind me saying what I'm thinking".
Then he realised the person was him.
"And I started laughing," he tells ABC RN's Sunday Extra.
It was a happy moment and Dr Francis, an American environmentalist and author, had good reason to revel in it.
By choosing to ditch his main form of communication for so long, he discovered that there were plenty of others he could use instead.
He also realised just how many lessons silence has to teach.
'I'm just going to shut up for the day'
Dr Francis, who has written about his life in Planet Walker: 22 Years of Walking, 17 Years of Silence, stopped speaking in 1973, the year he turned 27 years old.
At that time, he was arguing a lot with the people around him in his home town of Inverness, California.
The cause of their disagreements was another of Dr Francis's abstinences. He'd stopped using any motorised transport at all, after witnessing an oil spill in San Francisco Bay in 1971.
"I was just devastated by the fact that a lot of birds and sea life had perished in that," Dr Francis says.
"I really wanted to do something more than just help clean up the beach … and so over the next year or so, I decided that I was going to give up riding … in cars and trains and planes."
His decision struck a nerve.
"People were upset about it … [they] got really angry with me because they thought I was doing it to make them feel bad because they weren't doing anything about the oil spill and the environment," he says.
Dr Francis wasn't just strolling around. Initially, he took a seven-year hike across the United States (with detours to complete study along the way). Then for the next 15 years, he kept walking, crossing 48 states of America and continuing through South America. It earnt him the nickname 'Planet Walker'.
At first the reaction of anger from people who encountered his decision to walk surprised him — then it annoyed him and he became argumentative.
"I spent many days and many miles arguing about the merits of walking, and that I was going to make a difference by walking," he says.
But the more he argued, the less convinced he became that his approach was having any impact. Instead it led to his decision to experiment with silence.
"I said, you know what, I'm just going to shut up for the day," Dr Francis says.
That quiet day brought with it a revelation: that whenever he was speaking with someone with opinions different from his own, he would simply interrupt to press his point of view.
"I realised that I hadn't been listening to anyone, because … I was thinking all the time of what I was going to say back to them," he says.
"I had stopped learning."
Dr Francis jokes that this decision didn't initially attract the same anger as his decision to stop using motor vehicles — because "people were relieved".
Then one day turned into two days, then stretched into weeks and months. Then, his community in Inverness "started to get very agitated", he says.
But by then, he was enjoying being in "an altered state" and in a place he "wanted to explore".
"I wanted to learn from listening — listening to people, listening to the environment, to nature."
Finding something wonderful in every silent day
Dr Francis never set out to achieve 17 years of silence — just as the days turned to weeks, so too did a year stretch into many.
There just seemed little reason to start talking again.
"Every day and every year I found something that was just so wonderful," he says.
His decision to refrain from speaking was not a decision to disengage.
During that time, he went to university to get his undergraduate degree, masters and PhD, in environmental studies, all while not speaking.
"And I gained so much from other people," he says.
"There are a number of ways of communication … probably about 75 per cent of our communication is really non-verbal," he says, pointing to physical cues and scents.
He also painted water colours, did pen and ink drawings and played the banjo.
The many lessons of silence
One of the things Dr Francis learned in his years of silence is that there's a certain kind of wisdom possessed by everyday people — those whom we might interact with at the shops, on the corner or in our workplaces.
"If I was quiet … people would say things that I really ought to have listened to," he says.
"It's not to say that everything … was like pearls of wisdom. But if you listen to someone long enough, and in the right frame of mind, you might hear that pearl of wisdom."
Another lesson was about how he communicated with himself.
When Dr Francis first stopped speaking, he had "all these conversations going on in my mind" critiquing his interactions with other people.
"Like, 'he said that and you said this, and if you had only said that, you could have won that argument'", he says now.
"And [the inner dialogue] just didn't seem to stop."
He realised that this — and his concern with arguing his point better — disappeared once he stopped speaking.
"The voices absolutely quieted, and my mind was in an altered place."
Lastly Dr Francis says he learnt about the connection between the environment and humans' interactions each another.
He realised the loss of animal species, loss of habitat, climate change, nuclear proliferation and war are all connected with how humans treat each other.
"Human rights, civil rights, gender equality, economic equity and all the ways that we relate — how we treat each other — is going to manifest in the physical environment around us.
Physical and environmental problems can't be solved, he argues, if "we're not treating each other well" and are able to work together.
Motivated by this drive to have new and positive human interactions, and so that he could thank people for being with him on his silent journey, Dr Francis spoke again on April 22, 1990.
It was the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. And it was the end of his 17 years of silence.
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