Our Daily Diet of Disquiet—Paying Twice
Two weekends ago, while my wife was away teaching at Loyola University, I treated myself to a solo trip to New York City to feast upon the performing arts. I attended an Opera, two Broadway Shows, and one solo performance at a very cool speakeasy by a very dear, decades-long friend of mine. This was a weekend of total immersion in the art and talents of some of the best professionals in the world who “left it all out on the stage” both entertaining and inspiring multi-generational audiences. What a high!!!
GiannottiArt
Living in very peaceful New Hampshire, I knew during my five-hour bus ride to New York City that the minute I stepped off of the bus, I needed to brace myself for the bombardment of energy that is The Big Apple. I knew I would be swept away by NYC’s tsunami of ever-present mix of excitement, incessant noise, grit, pushing and shoving, construction, traffic, expense, standing in lines, small hotel rooms for big bucks and the list goes on. Yes, I willingly chose to pay money for this disquieting experience.
Interestingly and in different ways, we all choose this experience each and every day. Each of us has our own Daily Diet of Disquiet. Leaf blowers painfully blaring in our neighborhoods. Our TV is left on because we are used to just having it on, maybe making us feel less alone. Kids’ natural raucous play and their penchant for defying sleep—therefore spoiling sleep for others. The motorcyclist that proudly shares two or three blasts of engine power to let us know she or he is there. Trains, buses, sirens, helicopters, horns, and the blaring music from a passing car that literally vibrates from the noise. These—and more—are all part of our all too familiar Daily Diet of Disquiet. So familiar is the ever-present noise of modern life, that I believe we have actually stopped hearing it. However, the fact is that our brains don’t. Our brains are like Geiger counters that can measure the slightest levels of disquiet; levels of which we are unaware.
Research shows us that our Daily Diet of Disquiet exacts a toll on us humans making us more agitated, restless when left unattended, and even emotionally disturbed when there is too much noise and not enough quiet. A few other impacts of our Daily Diet of Disquiet are higher blood pressure, increased blood viscosity, and longer-term, higher rates of cardiovascular disease. Because noise pollution stresses our hormonal and nervous system, over time, that same stress predisposes us to the development of a variety of diseases.
For pregnant mothers, preeclampsia (a condition causing high blood pressure) is more common when exposed to higher noise levels. For children, noise pollution can affect a child’s hearing at ANY stage of development including fetal, infancy, and adolescence. Continued loud noise at school or home might can cause kids to learn with compromised concentration, communication and speech development, and cognitive performance. In the long term, it can impact children’s ability to form relationships and their confidence.
And let’s not forget another part of our Daily Diet of Disquiet. It is called worry. Worry, another form of noise, can cause us to be disquieted. Just like the nearby lawnmower or the broken muffler gurgling by, or the faint din of the refrigerator, worry infiltrates our head which often leads to anxiety. If this kind of disquiet becomes persistent or worse, chronic, it can literally destroy us. Mark Twain once said, “I have experienced many problems in my lifetime, most of which never happened.” I have found that this applies to most of the people I have professionally coached and most of my personal relationships. In addition to our brain being a Geiger Counter as mentioned above, it can also be a life preserver against the ills of disquiet. We just have to learn to listen to our brain in order for it to serve as a life preserver against disquiet. And the only way we can listen to our brain is to consciously and intentionally slow down long enough to hear it. Listening to our brain’s warning signals that know when it is time to worry and when it isn’t time to worry can save us from ourselves.
Now, juxtapose all these kinds of noises to being on an African safari where the loudest noise you hear would be a clap of thunder, a lion’s roar, a screeching vulture, or the unmistakable trumpet of a wayward African elephant. In stark contrast to New York City, or your hometown, imagine this fact: African wild animals spend their entire day in the embrace of Mother Nature’s quiet. Yes, that is right. Their entire day is spent in quiet. This concept is not something that humans are used to and we rarely experience it. The comparison between the stimulating chaos of New York and the calm of Africa could not be more different.
Photo by Hannes Lochner
Imagine sitting beneath a star-lit African sky, where a symphony of quiet brings a heightened awareness of the lack of noise. The thick black African night with its quiet mystery washes away any stress and offers a new relationship with sight and sound.
That relationship is Quiet.
Yes, I know. It is not realistic for us to scurry to Africa for some peace and quiet, but believe it or not, even with all of our busyness, this kind of quiet IS readily available to each of us without traveling to a different continent. Quiet is, or it can be, readily available; but it has to be a choice. I have found escape from ever-present noise by lying down and looking up at a tree or bathing myself in any sunset or sunrise as the world makes its miracle from light to dark and back again. Quiet can be had by mindfully turning off things or getting away from things around you like the television, radio, noisy or nosey neighbors, and avoiding restaurants that require you to yell to hear the person sitting next to you. Parents might find respite when they take a moment to reimprint their hearts with the sight of their child asleep in pure innocence. And of course, each of us can find a blissful kind of quiet by simply melting into the tenderness of someone we love. Perhaps sharing intentional quiet is the ultimate “Great Escape” from our world’s disquiet.
Yes, I knowingly paid to have the noisy New York City experience. And I did have fun. And as I said at the beginning, I paid money for it, but I actually paid twice. Once with money and the other I paid with a certain cost to my quieter health. When it came to disquiet, I was both the “victim” (experiencing the disquiet of New York City) and the “perpetrator” (making a conscious choice) in this noisy crime upon myself. Maybe it is time for us to recalculate what we are paying to maintain our own Daily Diet of Disquiet. While none of us can totally escape the personal noise factory we have unknowingly designed for ourselves, we do have the power at any time to mitigate what it does to us and how often.
What would happen FOR you? For all of us? If we all embraced the readily available gift of quiet?
GiannottiArt
