A Time for Silence
My new apartment is quiet. I love quiet. My quiet fish Saffron swims awkwardly in his tank for a second or two before he slumps defeated onto the stones at the bottom. He is two years old, but, judging by his recent disinterest in food and inability to swim except in great bursts from obvious effort, Saffron is probably going to die soon. That sounds morbid. He has been an exemplary pet, and for a fish, has seen many sights and met many new people. I still dread his death.
The clock on the wall of my new apartment is silent. One of my first nights here, I sat in the living room staring at the clock's pendulum swinging back and forth as I absorbed the feeling of this new space. I found myself wondering if I LIKED the clock, if it matched my intended decor. Normally I don't have clocks in my living space, because even though I love the pleasing design of analogue clocks, they often tick...tick...tick...to distraction. At that thought, I realized I didn't hear anything! Maybe it is the pendulum's movement that makes ticking unnecessary, but either way, the clock stays.
My workplace is incredibly loud. We are required to wear earplugs for our protection, and to receive yearly hearing tests to ensure that our ears are not damaged. When I first started the job, I strained to understand my coworkers' words as they spoke to me over the massive machinery and through face masks. I know I made strange facial expressions as I leaned in to catch my boss' words. I marveled at everyone's ability to understand each other across the room. After a few months, my ears have learned to differentiate, not only my coworkers speech patterns, but also the changes in the sounds coming from the machinery. Like the more seasoned workers, I can tell without checking, whether or not work is coming down the line and how long I have to finish up some other task before I have to rush over to take care of the impending supplies.
I don't understand the need to fill all of one's time with noise. If you have ears that function properly, there is always some sound punctuating the air at any given moment. In nature, it is wind blowing through tree leaves, birds singing, bugs whirring, animals calling, or waves crashing. In the city, the sound is car horns, train whistles, people, people, people, sirens, air conditioning units on buildings, or even the sound of electricity running through appliances. Even when TVs are off, they are loud. If I could seal myself in a soundproof room, I would hear my own heartbeat and breath meet each second in rhythmic patterns.
As far as I know, Time is silent. Whether I choose to fill it with external noise or not, it moves forward, unbeknownst to my ears.
We have discovered that moving at the speed of sound produces a sonic boom. With that, I wonder, if we are moving slower than such integral facets of existence such as Sound and Light, maybe Time too is moving at such a high speed that we are unable to properly quantify it. Maybe the passing of Time does make a sound, but our imperfect ears cannot pick up the frequency. The way we measure Time is prefabricated and limited, like early attempts at explaining sound, light, and radio waves, before we even knew what they were and how they truly functioned. Maybe there is a correlation between how loud and fast we live, to how long we live. Tortoises, which move slowly and quietly, live for 100-200 years. Hummingbirds and bugs, whose frantically beating wings whir at a high pitch, live a few years, or days.
Fanciful, unscientific thoughts, I'm sure, but it feels reasonable that time and sound are somehow related. Time appears to expand when not filled with sounds to distract me- without the radio or movie I play in the background of my daily activities to "pass the time." It is hard, for some people, to sit in silence, to face those thoughts that are conveniently drowned out by daily noise. It is hard, for some people, to be silent with friends, coworkers, or relatives. Surely, if together, one must fill the air with talking for it to be meaningful. For me, working with or spending time with someone in silence at times, allows for me to notice how they move, sit, walk, breathe, rub their eyes, scratch their arm, or clear their throat. I pause to wonder, when they are not speaking, what is going through their minds or what their body language says in the silence.
In quiet moments, I contemplate that I am not the main actor on the stage of Time. While I sit in my apartment typing undulating thoughts on a digital screen, there are people downstairs visiting with relatives, friends out of town on vacation, strangers walking their dogs along the tree-lined streets, and countless lives spreading out in ever-pulsing waves on the shores of Time. In these two hours of writing in silence alone, many someones somewhere were born, and some have died. Choosing time for quiet forces me to start listening.
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