Do we NEED silence

The world has more Noise than ever before. We can’t seem to find it anywhere. The
Phones, TV, social media, vehicles, planes overhead, even your thoughts. The modern world surrounding your every waking moment, drowning you in an ocean of sound. They say too much of anything is bad for you, and I believe this is true for noise.

I started to feel suffocated by the modern world. I looked like a raccoon, with the dark rings under my eyes, too many things on my mind at all times. I noticed the bombardment of input everywhere I looked. Even being too contactable, I would send and receive messages, to fill in the boredom, of fleeting thoughts I had. Unnecessary to say the least but hey it filled in the time. I felt like I was doing it in the end out of habit, a compulsion that I couldn’t control. I had to consume and stay connected, otherwise I would start fidgeting, unable to sit still, eyes looking away when people talk to me.

I thought about it one day, how easy it is now to contact anyone at any time, what moments are truly silent. Turning off the TV, phone, and computer I could still hear things around the home. I could hear cars going by, the occasional plane, the neighbors murmuring inaudible words through the drywall. Yes, you could use noise-cancelling headphones, earmuffs. But I decided that was too artificial and went out of town up into the mountains.

Driving there you leave town on a paved road, it ends up turning into a dirt road, ruts increasing as you go. I take a shady offshoot from the main trail; overgrown, must not have been anyone down here for a while. That’s a good sign for me. I wind my way through the overgrown trail, having to stop a few times to drag off fallen branches blocking the way, ending up at the bottom of a valley. The area was dense bushland, nobody in sight. I park the car, walk in, and find a nice little grassy area next to a fresh water creek. The creek’s water was crystal clear, and appeared to be coming out from underneath the hillside. Rolling over round rocks and snaking its way out of the valley. I sat there, listening, not hearing anything except the occasional bird, breeze through trees. It was not silent in the exact sense, though there was no artificial sound. I had no reception, nobody could contact me, and knowing that I had forgotten I even had a phone on me. No planes, no cars, no voices. I sat there and listened. There was something very different about sitting there and listening to it; it felt refreshing, comparable to diving in a cool body of water on a warm day. My thoughts which started off loud started to fade more and more as time went by. This was right, this is what I needed. It felt natural, made me relax, filled me with contentment.

After getting home my whole day was improved, I felt great.

I began to cut down on things that I realised were just noise. Though it is harder than you would think and takes some time to get used to. For instance, resisting that urge when you have a good thought pop up and sending it through to a mate, or driving and wanting to drown out the silence with sound for company. You don’t have to not talk to anyone forever or always be in the silence, but you do need a good dose of it daily. It takes time, it’s uncomfortable, but in the end it pays off. When you do talk to a mate, the conversation feels so much more interesting. When you do play that song, it sounds so much better.

I’ve realised that Silence is a meditation for the soul. It is something I need, and without it regularly I feel like my mental health begins to suffer. It gives my mind a rest, lets me recover. I need recovery to grow, and by Sitting in Silence, my mind has time to rearrange and put things into order and perspective. Figure out what’s worth keeping and what’s not. It brings me back to the present moment and reminds me to slow down. The silence allows me to see that the ‘living’ in life is in the now, and we won’t realise that unless we pause for a moment and take it all in.