I can usually feel the pause coming before it happens. Somebody is answering a normal question, something about their unit or their MOS or how they ended up in Frisco, and then I ask the other kind of question, the one that isn't really about facts, and their eyes go somewhere else for a second.
Three seconds. Four. Sometimes longer than that. Early on I hated that silence. I'd jump in and rephrase the question, or offer an easier version of it, something they could answer without going wherever they'd just started to go. I told myself I was being considerate. Really I think I just didn't know what to do with the quiet, and neither the guest nor I had figured out yet that the quiet was where the conversation actually lived.
I've learned to sit in it now, mostly. Let the camera roll. Let the silence get uncomfortable for me instead of them. It took longer than I want to admit to understand whose discomfort that actually was, and that rushing to fill it was doing the guy across from me a disservice dressed up as kindness.
What I still can't do reliably is tell apart two kinds of silence that look identical from the outside. One is a man deciding he doesn't want to go there today, and what I owe him is an exit, not another question dressed up as an invitation. The other is a man deciding whether he trusts the room enough to go there at all, and what he needs from me is nothing, just enough room to walk into it on his own timing. I've guessed wrong both directions more than once. Pushed when I should have let it go. Backed off when a beat more would have gotten us somewhere true.
I know that pause from the inside too, having sat on the other side of a camera and a question I wasn't ready to answer. Most people, even good people, can't stand more than a couple seconds of somebody else's silence before they say something to help. Thank you for your service. I can't imagine. You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to. All of it meant well. All of it, more often than not, closes a door that was just starting to open.
I don't have a formula for how long to wait, or how to tell the two silences apart before it's too late for it to matter. I used to think not having a formula meant I hadn't figured out my own show yet. Lately I think the not knowing might be closer to the actual skill than anything I could write down and teach somebody else, the willingness to stay in a moment without a plan for how to get out of it.
The next time someone you care about goes quiet mid sentence, do you fill that space for them, or do you find out what they were about to say?
“The best thing I have ever said in an interview is nothing, timed right.”