It’s what you feel when you aren’t doing anything. You feel parts of yourself that you forgot were there. It’s in the moment that you feel the wind blowing your flyaway hairs, you hear a quiet that is louder than the world around you. The world where people are yelling, cars are honking, and machines are machining. You realize that quiet is the thing you have been running from, or hiding from. Because once quiet finds you, you find yourself consumed in its loudness. You see the dust floating in the air in the beams of the sun. You hear those thoughts in your head that haven’t had the chance to come forward with all the other noise going on up there. You scare yourself in that way. Seeing something that has always been there, right in front of you, shows you that you are more ignorant, more distracted than you prefer.
It’s a necessary thing that is more underrated, forgotten, neglected, and relied on least when it comes to self-care. Thinking that the noise of life, the sounds of people, of music, of traffic, of nature, of games, of movies, of cooking, of conversation is more substantial to our growth than what quiet, what slowness, what reflecting on what has happened to us, is the kind of thinking that causes us to stay in an unnoticeable rut. We become ignorant to things in life because we actively portray our lives through the noise, the happenings, that we go through.
But when the happenings are over and we find ourselves naked we find ourselves in a place that meets us with either familiarity or hostility with a pushback that we filter with drugs, alcohol, and Netflix. We neglect ourselves of the quiet that we need, that others around us need us to have. We lie to ourselves, or more we don’t get to know ourselves. The time we are offered to familiarize ourselves with the why’s, the how’s, and the hmm’s become a mind-numbing buzz that becomes detrimental to the foundation we stand on.
The quiet can be where you find out what is important to you. It’s where you realize what you want. It’s where you see what you don’t want to deal with anymore. It’s where you see through the bullshit of the world that you surround yourself with. Or, it’s where let your mind wander. You may find nothing in the quiet, and that’s part of the deal.
The thing about this quiet though, it’s not only part of the auditory sense of the definition, but really all the senses. It’s the stillness you find around you. It’s the taste that you find on your tongue. It’s what you see beyond the bullshit.
It’s what you notice.
Taking time to notice things is more rare than I think most are aware of. So easily we are distracted by the touchscreens we have so close to our fingertips. So quick we are to jump into a conversation just to be a part of it. It’s hard to stand back because, shit, what if somebody notices?
In(Between) Dreams 