enjoying the silences
noise
When we get the rare visitor to our home (it happens occasionally... family and friends do pop down to see us) they often make the observation, "Isn't it quiet here?"
With me being both a positive and generally fairly literal sort, and this being one of the major - if not the prime reason - for choosing the place we call home, I will normally assume that they're making a compliment about our place. I nod and say "Yep, it's lovely isn't it?"
But I realise that other people - perhaps more extroverted and social people than me, like some of my family and my wife's friends (and most other human beings in general I suppose) - are coming from their town and city homes surrounded by... well man-made stuff happening, all the time, and they are perhaps going to find the lack of noise here kind of strange.
These weird people might even be actually missing the noise.
They come from places where there is traffic. There is always traffic. Engines, tyre noise, rumbles, hums... hang on, I need my thesaurus... burbles, thrumming, screeching, whirring, droning... etc., etc. There are sirens, horns, beeping, honking, and just off recognisable beating music thumping in cars, perhaps an occasional jet passing overhead.
All. The. Time.
Then their houses are filled with stuff making noise. There's TV's and radios, most of them have those smart speaker things they shout out instructions to, and they make noise back. Phones ring and ping and buzz, and some people even walk around - in somewhere that's making ample noise already - with a pair of headphones on (or in) to make other noises just for them.
silence
So they don't have silence. Ever. Are they afraid of it? Have they been conditioned to believe that silence is equated to boredom, so if there is no noise, they must make some?
Personally, I don't like it one bit. I even ask J to turn the TV down when she's watching some show with a live audience (or at least the sound of a live audience) whooping and screaming and applauding, with the encouraged enthusiasm way beyond what is warranted for what is happening in the actual show. (Yeah, looking at you 'Strictly Come Dancing'.)
Perhaps I'm just too sensitive to it.
I don't know how I do it but when, on the rare occasions I have to travel and go into a town or city for some reason, I have to kind of filter it out. I am deliberately deciding not to 'hear' it, rather like I have trained my brain to not 'hear' the always-there tinnitus whistling in my ears. Yes, the noise is there if I focus any mental attention on it, and sometimes, like when crossing a busy road, I have to pay attention to if I want to survive I guess, but a lot of the time I'll be grim-faced and concentrating on blocking it out. I don't get on with urbanity, all that concrete, brick, and NOISE.
Give me nature. The wind, the birds, the sea crashing on the rocks at the foot of the cliffs on the coast path. Even there we're not immune from rumbling agricultural machines, distant whining chainsaws, and airline jets roaring high across an otherwise quiet scene, but the restful, non-human moments are there - in fact in the very best places, the noisy moments are the occasional intruders, and where nature makes the soundtrack, I can relax and be myself.
On the Fediverse, Sunday's are good because they have a hashtag that is ideal for me. You are encouraged not to use any words at all when you post a picture with the #SilentSunday tag. So you don't even have to make any imagined noise with your internal voice reading it.
Here's my #SilentSunday picture for this week.
If you liked the post, click the toast! (I guess just close it and quietly slink away if you didn't)