All I really wanted was a quiet place to sit and gather my thoughts and write something in my journal.
In trying to do just that, I have been reminded of just how noisy our world is. It seems like no matter where you go, there's going to be some kind of noise. When I say that, I mean human generated noise... and I don't just mean trcks braking and car horns and construction sites, either.
When I sit in my home office, there's the eternal sound of fans going, and computer equipment humming. Since my space is downstairs next to the utility room, I can also hear the sound of water flowing in and out of the house through the pipes, and the sound of the water heater kicking on when someone runs hot water.
If I try to sit anywhere near the kitchen, there is the sound of the refrigerator running, the sound of a window fan, and there might be background noise coming from the laundry room. Not exactly stillness.
My creative workspace — where I do my artwork — tends to be fairly quiet but it faces out towards the neighborhood street, and there is fairly frequent traffic noise. I suppose I would be less likely to hear it if it weren't for the fact that we live on a fairly steep hill with a curve, and so anybody with a truck or towing a trailer makes a fair amount of noise going up the hill.
It makes me really appreciate how quiet it is when we go to Denmark and visit my auntie's house for holidays. Because the house is fairly old-fashioned, and is located on the middle of 24 acres of forested land, there simply is not as much mechanical noise as we experience elsewhere.
The world is NOISY!
I used to think that relative quiet was the normal part of life, but it turns out that it is the exception rather than the rule.
Perhaps all the noise — foreground and background — is also the result of our growing need to be "connected" at all times. We're constantrly on the phone; online; plugged into our music and news... even while jogging or working out... and there is just no getting away from the noisiness of it all.
I also acknowledge that our noisy world has perhaps made it so — conditioned us, if you will — that many people are actually extremely uncomfortable with silence. I remember one friend confessing to me that if she was ever in a place that seemed "too quiet" she would start feeling anxious, with a creeping sensation of worry that she was dead. It was her way of saying that she actually needed ambient noise around her in order to feel alive.
Whereas I could definitely understand what she was saying from an intellectual perspective, I have always felt unable to understand it in my heart and soul.
I guess we're all just different.
I think my first conscious awareness of how much I am bothered by artificial environmental/ambient noise came during my years of living in Texas where — during most of the year — there was never any getting away from the pervasive sound of air conditioners humming in every back yard; on every building.
Nothing like some unit's unbalanced squeaky fan to keep you awake and starting at the ceiling, all night long!
In the end, I gave up on finding a space without noise. When I do find a quiet spot and a quiet moment, I treat it as a gift and am very grateful.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great week ahead!
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Created at 2025.06.08 18:49 PDT
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