Silence

I woke up on the grumpy side of the bed today. There really was no reason for it; yesterday wasn’t a bad day—just a regular day with some frustrating moments. After grumpling (Like my new word? It means “grumping while cuddling.”) with an insomnia-bitten CH for a few minutes, I hauled my butt out of bed and headed out the door for my morning run.

I’ve taken to listening to audiobooks during my runs lately, but as I got to the main thoroughfare in my housing development, I realized that my mind was focusing more on the silence around me than on Maniac Magee. After a few more feeble attempts to tune in, I gave up and turned the book off, finishing the rest of my run listening to the silence around me.

The silence is what I love about early mornings. It’s one of the reasons I drag myself out of bed at 4:30 a.m. on weekdays, one of the reasons why I cherish being up earlier than anyone else in my house. We live in a noisy world. Almost every second of every day is filled with some form of noise: traffic speeding across busy highways and streets, melodies flowing from music players, voices competing with each other on TVs, coworkers collaborating across office areas, kids screaming or laughing at school and home, people going about their everyday business. Humming the background music to it all are the electrical appliances we rely so heavily on.

Noise is fine, and I’d much rather be able to hear it than hear nothing at all. But I regularly need a break from it. I don’t know if this part of being an introvert or something hard-wired into my person, but constant noise exhausts me. At the end, and sometimes the beginning, of each day, I need time to rest my ears and mind from the cacophony that penetrates them the rest of the day.

Now I didn’t get total silence on my run this morning. CH and I may joke that we live in the boonies, but we’re nowhere near to living outside of civilization. We just live in a much quieter, more rural area of our big city. So I got a tiny bit of traffic noise mixed in with some croaking, chirping, crowing, and rustling. But this noise didn’t bother me as much because the air had a feel of silence to it, a stillness that called to me over the exploits of a homeless kid who loves running. So I turned off my own noise-maker and basked in this morning’s gift to me, this secret it seemed like only I was privy to.