Wednesday, July 8, 2015

Silence...

Day twenty-two: Yesterday’s topic in my writing group was silence. I found myself thinking about that one, wondering what constitutes silence to you, trying to decide what it is for me. Absolute silence is the absence of noise, but sometimes just the ceasing of an irritating sound can seem like silence.

For me, silence is colours. The silence of the dead of night when not even a cricket chirps – or a car horn beeps depending on your location – is for me velvet blackness. Not depressing blackness, which is more of a void, where everything is sucked in and nothing comes out. That sort of blackness is flat and impenetrable. The blackness of the quiet time, usually predawn stillness, is soft, velvet, gentle. It’s like a blanket that wraps you up and offers peace and renewal. I love that silence, I love feeling that I am the only living creature awake and aware. I feel in touch with the earth at those times.

When an annoying sound finally ceases – like the giant jackhammer attached to the digger that almost drove me mad a couple of months ago – the silence really is golden. My mind is suffused with yellow the shade of the palest part of a daffodil. The other daily sounds make themselves heard again and everything around me returns to normal. That pale yellow stays in my mind for hours. Well except the times when the jackhammer started up again a couple of hours later and the yellow in my mind shattered just like a hammer had struck it.

The colour of the annoying sound, whatever it may be, is red and orange, like sparks from a fire. My mind becomes focused on these colours, on that noise, to the exclusion of everything else, which is why I become irritable. I don’t know why it is that some sounds are so annoying and others can be tuned out. That jackhammer gave me a headache, yet when I first came here I was able to relegate the sounds of traffic and the constant beeping of horns to that grey background noise I am only conscious of when it stops.

I have lived a lot of my life in the country where it is usually quiet apart from cicadas and animal sounds. At night all you hear are crickets and other nighttime creatures. The darkness in the country is quiet too without any streetlights to break the blackness. When you are used to the constant buzz of sound that comes with city or large town living, and the presence of so many lights that it is never fully dark, it can be confronting to spend a night in the country. Perhaps it is because in silence and darkness your thoughts turn inwards, and a lot of us are not comfortable with our inner selves.

I think maybe a preference for noise, or for silence, is also an indicator of whether you are an extrovert or introvert (going back to a recent blog post, More introspection, because that's what I do...). I like silence, I like to be alone with my thoughts. I don’t turn on the television for background noise, the daily sounds that surround me are enough. Today those sounds are: some timber being dismantled on the construction site next door, the sound of the fan blowing a welcome addition to the sea breeze onto me, the sound of gamer son’s voice as he saves the virtual world with his friends, and of course the constant sound of traffic and car horns (here, car horns are blown as a kind of conversation and frequently in place of indicators, or adherence to the demarcation given by the white lines on the road. I wrote a blog some time ago on that, titled Taxi!).

One thing I have always noticed about the extroverts among my friends is the noise that surrounds them. They like the television on, the radio on, they like to talk, to have noise. I know this is a generalization but it does make sense to me. An introvert’s mind turns inward, an extrovert likes to focus on the world outside their head. So while I view too much noise as sensory overload, for an extrovert it’s energizing.

This is not to say that I hate all noise, this is not the case. But I do need some quiet time in every day, time to recharge my internal batteries and feel refreshed. So what can you do if you live in constant noise and your soul is craving quiet? When my children were small I rose early, at least an hour before them so that I could drink my tea in the morning stillness. It gave me the energy needed to cope with the constant noise and chaos of young children. At a different stage in my life I worked at a job where I started work at 9.30am, so I used to rise extra early and take my dogs for a run at a nearby park. I got up at 4.30am and we were back by 5.30am. Plenty of time to do the morning chores and the dogs loved the adventure of running in the dark. Mind you it meant I went to bed early…

In this world it’s far easier to be in noise than it is to find silence. But you can, even if it is ten minutes of nothing but the sound of the shower water running over your head each day, or that short time in the morning before everyone else wakes, or maybe you can find your alone time at the end of the day.

So, to get back to my original thought, what constitutes silence for me? I think it will always be the country silence, the sound of nothing but the cicadas and the wind. Even thinking about it puts my mind back to my old home from so long ago. But, I haven’t lived there in a long time. So now, silence is when my immediate surroundings are peaceful and there is no unnecessary noise. I spend a lot of time searching within myself, and I know there are many people who don't. But for those people I say, try just spending ten minutes a day with only yourself and silence. You may be surprised with what you learn.




This is my home town Kenilworth, tiny isn't it? And I didn't even live in town, I lived out of it.










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