Silence is Golden

Ever since electricity was discovered and marketed we have not had a moment's peace! One noise-making machine after another has invaded our space with its humming, drumming noise. You cannot escape it wherever you go. Even in the mountains, in the furthest reaches of the wilderness you will hear the distant sound of a four-wheeler buzzing its way across the continent. Are we never to have quiet? Maybe it sounds like I am complaining. Well, I guess I am, a little. I crave silence like I crave water on a hot day, and some days it seems that the desert of noise will just go on forever.
Someone has said, “Silence is golden”, and the longer I live, the more I agree. A while back, when we lived in a different part of the country, we used to wake up every night in the middle of the night to the sound of a train that seemed to go right through the bedroom. At first it frightened me, but after a few weeks of it, I could get through it without jumping out of bed, screaming. As a mom, I do a lot of kitchen duty and I can tell you that these days kitchens are noisy places too. What with blenders, mixers, microwaves, refrigerators, timers, beepers, and automatic everything, it can turn a Sunday dinner into an ear-splitting nightmare.
But, do we really need silence? Well, ask yourself if you need to be hungry. Yes? Why? You need to be hungry in order to want to eat. If you ate constantly you would never relish any of your food. “Hunger is the best sauce”, they say. Being hungry makes you appreciate and enjoy your food. Without hunger, eating would be a chore. So it is with noise. Without silence you cannot appreciate sound.
Now think about what has happened to us. We have noise bleeping, booming, zooming and droning continuously in our ears from morning until night and then all through the night, with hardly a breath. Then, add to that the noise of choice, like television, I-pods, cell phones, and CDs which usually run on top of the other noise, making a cacophony that under other circumstances might even be considered torture. Why do we do this to ourselves? Is it that we are afraid of the silence? Have we forgotten what silence is?
Now, gold is golden too. But, in this country today we no longer have a gold standard for our currency. Money is printed, circulated and used, and there is nothing behind it but a promise. Everywhere you look there are frantic voices shouting opinions and jumping to conclusions. We forget that you cannot print money without something to back it up Things get steadily worse and little people like you and me try to avoid being swept away by the growing tide of insecurity. In the same way, when the industrial age arrived with all it's noise, we forgot that silence is golden. Noise is everywhere and silence is forgotten. We forgot to look for the birds and listen for the butterfly. We forgot that silence is a natural healer. It brings sanity, peace, contentment and a host of other benefits. All this became a lost art with the advent of constant noise.
So, what do we do? Well, I can tell you what I do. I turn off the 'boob tube' and get outside in my garden and talk to a few potato plants. I shut down the microwave and cook something simple, by hand, like pancakes, and sit down with my children in a room with no other noise and just talk and eat. I take a few minutes every day to go into a quiet room and just be quiet myself for a while. It is amazingly helpful when I have things I am worried about, or things I need to figure out. And, I make a point of stopping everything for a beautiful sunset, moonrise, landscape or any other slice of quietness and beauty. Being quiet makes the noise more bearable and it also makes music and other beautiful sounds even more enjoyable.
The gold standard for our economy won't be coming back tomorrow, but we can do our part to be a voice of reason and quiet honesty in a day of shouted opinions and indecorous behavior. Let's bring back the gold of silence, which has become as lost as the gold standard for our economy, and who knows, maybe it will bring with it some of the peace so desperately needed in this noisy world.