Listen To the Quiet

 For this Thursday Thought, I’ll be intertwining my own thoughts with some thoughts penned in a blog I found on line by a man named Joe Broadmeadow.  I don’t know Mr. Broadmeadow, but I liked this particular blog of his.  He says what I often am feeling nowadays.

I don’t know about you, but I think we live in a very noisy world.  And much of that noise is noise that we make ourselves, for ourselves.  We constantly have the television, music, game apps, earbuds, phones, or other noise makers on and running.  If we live in an urban area, we constantly are hearing car horns, sirens, street noise, and other sounds of the city.  We may have neighbors close by who turn up the volume of whatever it is they are listening to at the moment.  Even in more rural areas, there is an abundance of man-made noise.  We can’t seem to get away from it…or more likely, we don’t want to get away from it.

As Mr. Broadmeadow says, “It’s a rare moment when we can actually listen to the quiet.”

As I get older, I am more and more drawn to the quiet.  The back yard of our home butts up against the back side of Pawnee Prairie Park in Wichita.  Often, I can go into the yard or sit on the back patio and hear nothing but the occasional barking dog, someone walking on the park path, kids playing somewhere in the neighborhood, nearby birds, and rustling breezes.  The noise of West Kellogg normally doesn’t penetrate.  We live close to Eisenhower Airport, so we do hear the occasional takeoff or landing.  But those are usually short-lived events.  We might occasionally hear a far-off siren, and sometimes we can even hear a train in the far distance.  The closest tracks are several miles away, and it takes a certain atmospheric situation for that sound to travel that far.

I often have the radio in my pickup turned off.  My phone seldom rings or goes off.  I often have the television off when in the same room.  Or if it’s on, it’s in the background or my wife is watching it.  I don’t do noisy video games.  I sometimes go somewhere in the house where there is quiet and I just sit or lay down.  I’ll sometimes turn off my phone entirely.  If someone wants me, they can leave a message or voice mail.  When we have grand kids over, I sometimes will go to a quiet part of the house and “recuperate,” if you will, for a few minutes.  And, I’ve been known to, when we have company, retire to the bedroom and rest for a few minutes in a quiet environment.

I well recall many years ago, we stayed in a bed-and-breakfast somewhere in Central Kansas.  The place was out in the countryside in the Flint Hills.  We both had jobs that were rather intense and sometimes stressful.  We needed a break, so spent, I think, the weekend at this B & B.  One of the first things I noticed there was how quiet it was when we were outside on the porch.  The silence…the lack of any noise whatsoever…was deafening.  It was so much different from what we were used to…it was a place where we hadn’t been in quite some time…a place of solitude and quiet.  My senses perked up as I strained to hear something…anything that would let me know I was OK.  But I needn’t worry.  I WAS OK.  It was just this strange nothingness…this absence of noise…that had me worried for a bit.

Ever since then, I have at times looked for times when I could be still…quiet…and my surroundings were that way as well.  And as I age, I seem to seek out those times and places with greater frequency and stay in them for longer periods of time.

I now have hearing aids.  I remember when I first wore them at the hearing place, and they turned them on for the first time.  It was like a whole ‘nuther world opened up for me.  I could again hear the various squeaks, groans, and other noises in places like offices, vehicles, and at home that I hadn’t heard for years.

But, those aids also made it more difficult to find quiet…absence of noise.  So, instead, I learned to listen to the sounds of the quiet.  Birds singing, rain falling, leaves rustling, squirrels chattering, owls hooting.  It’s not quite the quiet of not being able to hear.  But it’s the quiet, I believe, that we were always meant to hear and enjoy.

I’ll end this thought with a quote from Mr. Broadmeadow, who says this about hearing the quiet.  “Taking a moment’s pause to walk in a snowstorm, anywhere away from the noisy cacophony of the world, one can actually hear the quit.  It may be hard to imagine, in a city or even a small town surrounded by modern society’s mechanism, that one can hear snow fall in a quiet forest.  But you can…and it will be magical.  To hear snow falling, it has to be quiet.  And to hear quiet, one must listen for it.  Shhhh.  Listen to the quiet.”

 

Blessings.