Noise

Have you ever considered how loud everything is? Honestly, I’m sitting on my couch and if I close my eyes I can hear my air conditioner running, vents rattling, people tapping as they work outside, a saw, my own breath, and my daughter as she plays. The air conditioner is loudest. When it shuts off, as it did just now, I can hear my deep freezer humming, people talking as they work, birds singing, and my dog snoring. I wonder- how much more could I hear if the air conditioner didn’t run and the freezer didn’t hum?

I live in a house with one TV. When I was growing up, there was a TV in the living room and each bedroom. I think my mother would have put one in the kitchen if she could have found the space, but as the house was old and the kitchen in the middle, she just turned on the bedroom and living room TV really loud, so as not to live in silence. Often, she didn’t even have them on the same channel. It drove me crazy. While she didn’t have a TV in the kitchen, she did have a really loud weather radio. She said it was for emergencies, but sometimes she would just play the same monotonous weather report from the local station over and over and over again. She never drove in silence either- radio always on to the same horrible saccharine, tooth-decaying-belly-ache-inducing Christian radio station (sorry, Spirit FM, I will never love you). Mom even slept with the TV on, still does. Now, I’m not talking about dozing off watching the late football game (she hates sports anyway) and waking up a 3AM to turn the TV off. I’m not even talking about intentionally falling asleep with the sleep timer on. I mean turning on the TV as you get into bed and never intending to turn it off. I mean that she cannot sleep without it. I’m going to write that again, in italics for emphasis: my mother cannot sleep without the television on. Sound and all, friends, sound and all.

When I was a teenager, the TV in my parent’s room used to wake me up in the middle of the night. As I mentioned earlier, the house wasn’t large, so my room was just down the short hallway. Mom kept the sound on the TV loud sometimes. When it woke me up, I was so angry that I walked right into their bedroom and turned the volume down. Sometimes, I got so upset that I turned the TV off. And, to boot, instead of thanking me in the morning, Mom would be angry that I turned it off. She usually blamed my dad first, but, deep down, we all knew it was me.

I live in a house with one TV that gets turned on no more than once a day (not because it’s on all day- it’s usually off) because I can’t stand noise. Seriously, my daughter is coloring in the floor next to me and she’s doing so quite well, but even still I told her to stop distracting me by asking for my comments on her art every two minutes. It’s hard for me to focus without complete silence. I don’t like noise and, yet, our world is full of it.

Consider the amount of noise made by modern conveniences: cars, air conditioners, power tools, lawnmowers, airplanes, trains, trucks, appliances, chargers, and the list goes on. And, yet, we add to this the often unnecessary noise of entertainment. We’re always listening to music or a podcast or the radio or we just have the TV on as “background noise”. That one really gets me. What do we mean when we talk about “background noise”? I’ll tell you what I think we mean. I think we mean that we cannot sit in silence because it scares us. We’re not used to it and we don’t know what will happen if we have to consider the beauty of bird song or the beating of our own heart. Much less, the sounds of our own thoughts and the inner workings of our souls. No, we’d better not go there. Too messy. Too risky. We’re too afraid of what we might find. No matter that it’s likely buried treasure and the secret to all that’s good and glorious.

Mom doesn’t like silence either. She often asked me how I could “sit there like that” in the quiet doing my homework. When I visit her now, I go sit on her porch in the quiet and she comes out to see what I’m doing. We talk for a minute and then she wonders aloud how someone could like the quiet so much. I’d like to know how someone could enjoy the loud so much, but there you are.

Now, I think I know why we’re hiding from the silence. Our pasts are often difficult to reckon with. The longer one goes without dealing with the hurts and difficulties of the past, the harder it is to actually sit with them in the future. It’s like a festering wound- if you don’t treat it, it only gets worse until you lose a whole part of yourself. Metaphor too spot on? Lose a whole part of yourself. There’s more to you than just your body, you know. So much more. And you’re hiding from it (at best) or killing it (at worst).

You were made for more than noise.

At the risk of sounding like the Grinch (“but what would I wear?!”), I propose that we put an end to the noise, to the best of our ability, once and for all. Now, if I could, I’d ride down from Mt. Crumpit and take all your noise makers away in my duct-taped sleigh and leave you to thank me later. As I neither live on a crooked mountain overlooking your unsuspecting village nor possess that much duct tape- though I do have a dog and antlers- we’ll do this the hard way (it’s always better that way, anyway).

What if I told you that you could learn to distinguish between the robin and the mourning dove? What if I told you that you could memorize and repeat to yourself whole poems, chapters, and verses of good, true things? What if I told you that you could sit in the silence and not be scared? What if I told you that it was good to be alone, for a little while (not forever, lest I get accused of heresy)? What if I told you that there’s treasure at the bottom of your soul that can only be found if you’re quiet and still enough to get it out?

What if I told you that the thing the noise is taking from you is life itself?

You can’t really live on television and podcasts, no more than a prisoner can really live on bread and water. Sure, it will keep your organs functioning and your mind awake, but you won’t really be alive. You’ll always be hungry and thirsty for more until you get so used to the bread and water that you look forward to that as the highlight of your day and forget the taste of alfredo sauce, good pasta, and wine. Is your nightly television binge the highlight of your day? Do you relish getting lost in a good podcast on the way home from work? Have you forgotten the nourishment and refreshment of silence?

We’re just scratching the surface here. You can limit your entertainment consumption (because it’s not all bad, after all) and throw away your Alexa (that thing on the other hand is utterly evil and you ought to burn it alive), but you’ll still be plagued by noise. You can’t control the cars on the highway any more than you can make the sun rise. You can’t stop using electricity all at once (although, I’d really love to try and if you’re feeling this, let’s talk). There’s noise in the world that was never meant to be there and even though technology is not itself a horrible thing, we always seem to use it towards horrible ends. We’re never satisfied. It’s never enough. We can’t have nice things.

Have you ever considered what it would have been like to live in the seventeenth or eighteenth century? I have. A lot. Not just because I love Treasure Island and pirates, but because electricity hadn’t been invented at this time. I imagine that the loudest thing you’d hear would be a water-powered mill and its grinding stone. If you weren’t near the mill, your rooster or running water or a thunderstorm. When you use a noise-maker (the irony!), what noise do you pick? Running water? Birds singing? Rainstorms? Interesting.

Until a few hundred years ago, people lived in, mostly, the silence they were meant to live in. They were close to nature and understood her ebbs and flows because they could hear and see them. I don’t know what we are close to in the twenty-first century (the threshold of hell?), but it’s certainly not nature. What if the reason for all of our stress, disease, and general unhappiness was that it was just too loud? What if that treasure I told you about was trying to get our attention by literally making us sick? Don’t you feel better when you get up early enough to avoid the sound of cars and just hear the birds sing?

I’m not a doctor, but I do have a treatment plan for you. Cut out the noise. As much as you can, as far as it depends on you. Eliminate unnecessary noise makers from your life and find time to get out deep into the wilderness from time to time and remember what you were made for- silence that could give you space to explore your soul.