Saturday, October 19, 2013

Appreciating the Silence While Sitting In Sackville Library ....


Here I am on a Saturday afternoon, sitting in the Sackville Public  Library while my daughter is spending the day at Mount Allison University.  Chances are, she'll end up studying her BA of Music here next year for post secondary studies.

It's 3:30 PM.  It's quiet and peaceful here.  This is something I have come to enjoy - peace and quiet. Even though we live in a small city in PEI with a population just shy of 15,000 people, it's incredible how noisy that city is becoming with the hustle and bustle of every day life.  


We live on one of the main artery streets close to downtown, and it has constant traffic on it nearly all day.  We're two blocks down from the junior high school so very often through the day we hear junior high students heading downtown for lunch and back.  We live two blocks up from the most popular dance club so quite often we here people in the wee hours of the morning heading home after a fun night out with friends.

I used to like white noise in the background ... in fact I couldn't stand complete silence.  Now it's quite the opposite.  I find constant noise very agitating.  When I'm home alone, I like to turn off all the 'noise pollution' in my house - this includes radio's, tv's, computers, telephone ringers ... all I'm left with is the silence.  I sometimes take out the batteries in clocks to eliminate the 'tick-tock-tick-tock' noise.

Silence, complete silence - how I cherish this!  Our brains need down time. It's like our digital devices, take smartphones for instance ... if electricity is always running through the device, it can get bogged down and stop running smoothly.  You have to turn it off, take out the battery, and clear out the cache in the apps in order for it to work properly and smoothly again.  This needs to be done on a regular basis.

Our brains are the same - we need to unplug and sit still in complete silence.  Every time I make time to sit in silence, I feel 100% better - I feel rejuvinated , I feel more at ease and at peace.