Noisy Silence (July 2013)
Do you ever sit in a quiet room and listen, I mean truly listen? Close your eyes and pay attention. I can hear the wind off my balcony gently blowing through the trees. I can hear my refrigerator humming its ubiquitous sound of cold. I can hear the highway and a steady drone of cars whizzing by. A bird, a gull I think, probably searching for lunch, loudly. There’s a banging, somebody doing construction. Oh yes and a car horn screeching its presence. Oops, a car alarm screams in protest, at what I do not know. A truck backs up punctuating the world with his irritating beep, beep, beep, beep…
You see I believe true silence is illusory. Even when a room is deathly quiet it is not silent. Spend some time in a library. It is one of the noisiest places that advocates silence. Listen carefully. The librarian is admonishing someone for something. Someone else is on the phone directing someone to the appropriate department. With the advent of computers there is a constant clicking of the keyboards. I can hear pages turning, sometimes in anger. There is the irritated sigh as someone looks for a book but cannot find it. Pages rustle and footsteps clack on the uncarpeted floor. There is no silence here.
Once upon a time our world was much quieter. We didn’t have cars and computers and the ever present hum of electricity. Our nights were darker, we didn’t have the light pollution of all the towns around us. I believe as a people we were calmer. Now we want more and more. No matter what we have, we crave new and better. What is that? What is it the psychobabble of the day is saying: relax, chill, be cool. Well it’s true! We live noisy and harried lives. We rarely seem to take the time to stop and smell the roses. Even when we relax it’s doing something energetic and noisy. Ah yes, the sounds of silence: the ever present white noise that surrounds our lives. They actually sell machines that emit white noise because it is often difficult to sleep when things are too quiet.
I wonder if we would know what to do if all sound stopped. I wonder if people who are completely deaf actually experienced true silence? All I know is that my world is noisy and sometimes irritating and I love it all!
Butterfly Sand 
I spent time on the north slope of Alaska and on a clear windless day, balanced between winter and spring, before the bugs come out, you can hear the earth turn.
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Ooooh, that sounds wonderful!
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There is only one noise that is pleasant to hear Pam…the sound of love ❤
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Sounds good!
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How true! Our village is ‘quiet’ today. That is except for the crickets, the frogs, down at the river near my house, the birds and the occasional vehicle down the road… ❤
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My kind of quiet!
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You won’t hear me complain! There was also a slight sound as I plucked some fresh blackberries from their branches… 🙂
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I really enjoyed this piece, making me think of white noise. But on behalf of maligned librarians and other library staff, rarely have I heard of one who admonishes. That was the idea I grew up with because in our small town we had a librarian who was unsmiling and grumpy. Not since then have I encountered one. You guessed it, I worked in libraries for years!
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hahaha My apologies! I however have been taken to task by a librarian or two in my mischievous youth! To her credit it was a lesson I learned well. And she did it with panache!
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For some, silence is deafening. I love silence. That’s when I can best hear the whispers of my heart.
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Me too!
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