‘Silence a Second Rate Citizen’, Media Says
It’s hard to escape the truth about the environment in which we live in the present day - it’s becoming louder, less private, more cluttered and filled with priorities we are afraid to fulfill. As our places of work and leisure are being filled with more sound and stimulation than at any other stage, it is clearly not an issue of sleeplessness — we are bracing an outbreak of pervasive lifestyle diseases as they are: an epidemic of lethargy and lack of motivation that makes it difficult to function in day-to-day tasks. Interestingly enough, we rarely pay enough attention to our surroundings to do anything about it. To make things worse, it doesn’t help that the media can do nothing but point the finger of blame back at the consumer who struggles to retain a sense of individuality and privacy is invaded at every corner. There’s no sure-fire cure for the twenty-first century plague, only a loudly heard lamentation for the goldenness of silent moments.
I never imagined that ground-floor apartment living would be so noisy and such an open exhibit - perhaps in that way I really set myself up as The Fool ready and willing to take that plunge over the cliff into the unknown. The first two months of tenancy involved open-house inspections on behalf of our unpleasant landlord, resulting in a myriad of eager first-home buyers, young mothers and keen-eyed investors all desperate for a piece of the property market and all ashamedly deterred by what they had seen.
It is not entirely a flattering place: it is traversed by a train station whose railway lines are about five metres from the bedroom window and carry layabouts and businessmen during the day with a heave and splurt and a clunk and squeak of heavy industry freight trains carrying coal for the country’s dependence on greenhouse-releasing potential energy. If we are lucky, we might hear the occasional plane passing overhead or the slamming door of our unceuth neighbours who assure us with non-verbal gestures, their upper-level-home superiority.
And last but certainly not least, the home life experience. I can’t remember the last time the household went for a day without the television switched on, the computer used or the Nintendo DS played. It doesn’t help that music must be played unecessarily loud through a speaker system when the laptop speakers work fine, that conversations are permitted to be spoken across the room like crossfire or that conversations at an arm’s length away must involve earsplittingly uncomfortable discussion about movies and games or the infamous question, ‘What’s for dinner?’.
But it’s not all bad news. One smart individual decided that the headphones were a wonderful invention and decided to publicise their usage and even the humble book can involve more than one level of sensory experience, giving rise to a sense of warmth and isolation. The main idea to know is that when the going gets loud, respond with whispers or keep far away from the kitchen of cacophonic sounds.
It’s an unconventional thought, but we rarely consider white noise to be a ‘rich’ substance; it is something that is loathed due to its seemingly empty quality but this could be no further from the truth - after all, we don’t begin a painting with a finished canvas. Silence is so important because it is a non-physical space of creative experimentation, where the ideas in our mind are played without disruption and scenarios from the past and future are envisioned in our mind. The real challenge is finding a moment of pure silence in a busy day but it comes with real rewards - serenity and order to one’s thoughts. Meanwhile I’ll try my best to find a square-metre perimeter of quarantine from noise!
So… what’s for dinner? :P