A to Z Joy: Quiet

As I was thinking about this post for the all important "Q" day, I realized that quiet and silence are not the same thing. Silence can be good, and silence can be golden as the saying goes, but silence is not what brings me joy.

I much prefer quiet, which I generally define as the opposite of loud. I enjoy ambient sounds and can tolerate almost anything--music, traffic, conversation--as long as it is quiet. Once the volume ramps up, so does my stress level. Even my favorite music will set my nerves on edge if it is too loud. The same goes for loud-talkers.

At an outdoor concert a couple of years ago, which was much louder than I anticipated, I despaired when I realized that I had left my earplugs in the car. I was forced to improvise with little wads of chewed gum wrapped in Kleenex. It sounds disgusting, I know, and I'm not proud of it. But my desperate ingenuity saved my sanity and most likely my hearing. Necessity is the mother of invention, after all.


I come by this naturally, as I was a very quiet child who was easily overstimulated. I think every single report card from elementary school identified me as being "too quiet," and it didn't get much better in the upper grades. A few years ago, I read the book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (2012), and I recommend it. In fact, I think I should read it again, because the world is just getting louder.

Of course, being too much of a "low talker" has its drawbacks, as well!









 

Radio Silence

Welcome to another Wednesday here at the Take It or Leave It challenge! After last week's extra podcast listening, I decided to flip the script this week and give my ears a rest. I'm a big fan of background music and almost always have it playing at home, at work, and in my car. I like many different musical genres, so it often doesn't matter what makes up the soundtrack of my day. But there's always something.

Until I turned it all off.

On the drive to work that first morning, which takes a whole twelve minutes, I feared I had made a terrible mistake. Without public radio, I had nothing to distract me from the annoying rattle coming from somewhere in my car. One of the first things I do when I get to my desk is choose the music I will stream for the day. Instead, I gritted my teeth at the sound of the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. Were they always that loud, or had I spontaneously developed some kind of Jaime Sommers bionic woman hearing?

At home, things were no easier. Cooking and eating without jazz music in the background is a lot less fun. And I don't know if this is weird, but I always wake up with a song in my head. Sometimes, it's a song I like. Sometimes, it's Wham's "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go". There's no rhyme or reason to it. Without a new song to take its place, I was stuck with the bad song earworm for much longer than I wanted.

That's how most of the week went: me being hyper-aware of sounds I usually don't even acknowledge. And I also found out that there is such as thing as having too much time alone with one's thoughts. Well, maybe not for Bill Gates. But definitely for me. I confess that I had many moments where I almost lost my resolve and turned on some damn music already.

But I made it through seven full days of radio silence. Surprisingly, things got easier by the end, and I actually began to appreciate (some of) my silent moments. And various studies suggest that silence lowers blood pressure, boosts immunity, promotes brain cell growth in the hippocampus, regulates hormones, prevents arterial plaque formation, and decreases stress (even more than listening to music!).

Well, that's some food for thought. I know this week can't possibly be a Take It, because listening to music makes me happy. But I will make a point to be more mindful of silence and fit it into my day on a regular basis.

And now, for some throwback weirdness, here's Thomas Dolby's "Radio Silence". So very 1982.