Noise

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Have you noticed how there seems to be more noise around us lately?
There seems to be more traffic noise, more noise related to work being done; for instance with leaf blowers that have taken over the rakes and brooms of old. And with the ability to listen to music everywhere we go, a lot of people have sounds in their ears pretty much anywhere they are going.
The other night when I was having dinner with family in a restaurant it even seemed that people were talking louder, were noisier.

Some time ago I have read some research into the songs birds sing; often to mark their territories. For a number of years the songs of birds were measured. As research goes it was about the number of different birds, the number of the same birds, the time they were most active singing their songs, and last but not least, the volume of their songs.
As it turns out, since we as humans get up an hour earlier during the Summer months, adapting Daylight Savings Time, the birds adapt as well. They have started singing earlier. And as the noise level of our society has risen, the volume of the bird songs has gone up.

It seems only logical that, having sounds ~ or even plain noise ~ everywhere around us for so many hours a day, that we ourselves have grown louder too. That we speak louder, laugh louder, sing louder…

Yet when there is so much noise around us, where will we find the quiet, restful places we can retreat to in order to listen to ourselves? To that very soft, inner voice that guides us, that answers our questions, that provides us with solutions we hadn’t even thought of before? Where do we find a place where the sound of the breeze rustling through the coloring leaves is so mellow, that we can actually hear the beat of our own hearts and the sound of our breathing in and out…
Where can we still experience the quiescence of a sunrise or sunset in that perfect moment between day and night; night and day…
With all the noise and sounds and music we bring into our lives, its rhythms leading our personal rhythms into higher frequencies, its volume turning our personal volume further and further up; where can we find silence?

For it is in the silence that we can recalibrate ourselves. In the silence we can regain our personal rhythm, take a deep breath, and reconnect with the unique person we truly are…
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