Quiet, not loud but let’s look at this a bit more. I truly lived pretty much the middle of nowhere for a decade and a half, I yearn for the skies but the quiet that’s what I miss most, my thoughts flow so much freer it is so much easier for me to think and address what is before me, I don’t have my head filled with useless noise. I didn’t just live in the middle of nowhere but I lived beyond the powerlines, beyond the phone lines. In a place where you could look for miles and see none of those lines crisscrossing the sky.
Do you know how noisy those things are? Do you know what it is like to hear the wind stop? Seriously, just hear that it has stopped communicating with you? Do you hear the hum of electricity that constantly surrounds you? I do, sometimes it truly grates on my nerves that I can’t find that quiet I am talking about here. Quiet it’s good for the soul. Yet many find it unsettling they aren’t used to it and try to feel these places with noise.
My parents when they came to Arizona they found the quiet where I live unsettling. They live in a small town, I am guessing less than a thousand people but I don’t remember the exact population. When I was there I was shocked at how noisy it was, they thought I was just trying to find something to complain about. It’s a crossroads for a couple of country highways in the middle of cornfields so you have a lot of grain trucks, farming equipment, yard mowers, electricity, people that create this endless noise. I am talking about a quiet without that, do you know it? I miss it, my parents had to find something to feel that quiet so they could sleep that’s how quiet. I yearn for that quiet. The noise stresses me.
The downside is where it is that quiet there is no work. The internet was sketchy so there was a serious lack of options for me though by providing my husband an office separate from the house we were able to get him a signal that allowed him to work remotely, we got him one of those Amish sheds and set it up in line of site of the cell tower and then got repeaters, that helped relay a signal to the house though it was not fantastic. Now I can work from home because of all these noisy things. My job is so noisy it comes with a level of anxiety, the constant beeping of incoming calls in my ear and the customer on the other line. I would be so much more effective if this could be done quietly where I didn’t have the anxiety of the noise but I haven’t figured out how to get that job yet. Living two decades in the desert somehow I don’t seem to have developed or at least found what will enable that yet.
Back to quiet, can you imagine sitting there with the absence of the hum of electricity that surrounds us, the noises in a house are so much more than you can imagine! Our refrigerator freaked me out the first two months we lived here I jumped every time the automatic icemaker dumped! I heard a car two streets over I was looking outside to see who was here. Yeah none of that where I lived before, it’s loud here! You can hear yourself and think with so much more clarity with quiet, that is a downside of technology, it’s not quiet where you can hear yourself deep inside most generally it requires this stuff that pollutes our environment with so much more noise than most realize. Sometimes one needs the quiet to be able to hear the wisdom within. Nowhere here with that kind of quiet. It’s rare that you can find that and when you do try to relish it and not feel it with noise, you will be amazed at how it restores your soul and how freely things begin to flow.
Which reminds me of what got me to think on this. My employer created this game to test your knowledge, it was meant to have a game show feel, it totally stressed me out as it had that ticker noise as your time ticket away, I was so stressed I missed questions because I couldn’t understand what they were asking me or didn’t realize I could make more choices because the noise prevented me from being able to understand what was being asked. I almost had the shakes by the time I finished that, oh my goodness it was awful the stress that noise induced!
It’s quiet, the raven’s caw is actually quiet loud. It draws your attention and it alerts you to what is going on nearby. Raven’s actually are great guard dogs in the middle of nowhere now that I think about it. Something I will seek to put to a test when I can. Animals shift when humans enter their domains.
I am not as jumpy now as I was though noises still affect me a lot and call my attention. I still wonder if what is going on in my neighbors yard three houses away is in my yard or elsewhere but I have largely adjusted. We humans are adaptable it’s not easy, especially when here it comes complete with bombs! I have never lived in a military area before and I can’t imagine how people in war torn countries stand it. Here they call those horrid noises freedom as the military is practicing to defend it. I am grateful for the freedom I had enjoying quiet.
What do you notice when you listen to the sound around you, even when it is quiet? Try to imagine silence.
