My home is a place that’s often bustling with noise. Two children, a husband and a dog makes it difficult to find peace and solitude. However, I’ve recently challenged myself to avoid turning on the radio or the television and I have made a commitment to embrace the silence that comes with the quiet.
I quickly learned that “silence” is not quiet at all.
There’s the hum of the bathroom fan as I take a shower.
There’s the cars driving on the road outside our home.
There’s the bus that starts and stops a few blocks away.
There’s the beeping of the heavy machinery working in the vicinity.
There’s the cats fighting over the same patch of grass.
There’s the airplane flying in the distance.
There’s the dog that barks in the yard across the way.
There’s the opening and closing of my neighbour’s door.
There’s the children playing in the park nearby.
There’s the sigh of my dog as he sprawls out on the landing of the stairwell.
There’s the rustling of the leaves in the trees.
The silence is far from quiet. It is a “noise” unique to the moment in which it occurs.
Not too long ago, I was sitting in my yard… relaxing and relishing in the few quiet moments I had to myself. Within this moment I heard a bird chirping.
However, it was so much more. By embracing the silence, I was given the gift of a beautiful song… the symphony of quiet, sung just for me.
A special thank you to Sofia, from Sofia’s Ideas for inspiring and inviting me to find the Magic of the Mundane.
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HA!!! Great minds I tell you!! Hope you had a wonderful Mother’s Day!
Quiet. Never as quiet as it first appears…But always lovely and much needed (especially by mothers;)
Funny, you and Melissa wrote about the same thing. It’s encouraged me to try and find a few ‘quiet’ moments in my day today.
Isn’t is amazing the gifts of wonder we can hear; the magic that surrounds us that can get lost in the everyday noise. Thanks for leaving your link at my Wonderfull (Full of Wonder) Wednesday post!
Just stopping by via Canadian-Moms.ca – It sounds like you live in my neighborhood – I get wierded out when I’m staying at someone else’s house and it’s too quiet, I need traffic to sleep now I guess :)
I agree! DH can’t stand the “quiet” and always has the radio or tv on. It makes me crazy a lot of the time. I don’t understand the need for noise to cover the noises we live with – it gets chaotic. Enjoy your not-so-quiet quiet :)
I LOVE this post. We spent the weekend camping and I woke up before my family. I sat in a chair outside, looked up at the sky, and listened. There’s a big difference between hearing and listening. Isn’t there? It’s a beautiful sound.
As I read “The silence is far from quiet,” I was struck by a comparison with light. How light can seem so simple, so ordinary, but when shown through a different lens- such as a prism- opens up to show the colors of the world to us. Thank you for sharing your lens with us, what a lovely perspective on silence.
I seriously think that we (Melissa, you, & I) are somehow linked to each other because its like we share the same brain!!! So many times, I have wanted to post something only to put it in my drafts because either you or Melissa already did! Hee! Hee! ;0
I will take this as a sign, that you & Melissa both posted a reminder for us to embrace the silence. With this transition we are going through right now, me being in charge full time, I feel like everything has been LOUD. I really do crave some quiet, some real silence, some real sleep, some real stillness. I just don’t know how to make that happen at the moment. *sigh*
Thank you, Jennifer, for this reminder, and for contributing this to {Magic of the Mundane}…