I’m on vacation on the North Shore of Lake Superior. When I arrived the first night, the lake was calm. The following day, there were gentle waves. This morning, soft sounds are creating the soundtrack for writing this blog.
It makes me think about the role of noise in our lives. Every time I visit the North Shore, I find an opportunity to experiment with something that is a departure from my regular life habits at home. This time, the invitation came from the TV not working in my rental.
I used to run into something that needed fixing and see it as a problem. It would elicit emotions of frustration or irritation and an urgent need to get it fixed. It would consume time and energy until I solved the problem. In recent years, I have shifted this habit to something new. Now, when I encounter a problem, I pause and notice. When my TV stopped working, I paused and noticed that I had turned it on to create background noise while I unpacked and settled in for my vacation. It’s a habit of mine.
The second thing I noticed was that I didn’t need the background noise. In fact, when I checked in with myself, my inner self was yearning to sit down and read my book. My inner self looked forward to settling into a single focus instead of juggling multiple inputs. This sparked an idea to try something new.
The North Shore always inspires me to experiment! In a previous vacation, I experimented with having an unscheduled day and tuning into the flow of life around me. Maybe on this vacation, I could experiment with living with less noise and distractions.
My boring old “no-signal TV” allowed me to experiment with reducing the noise I habitually live with. It invited me to embrace the natural sounds around me and see what I might learn. I wondered how having less noise in my daily life would enhance the quality of my life.
We all live with noise in this world. It might come from our news feeds, TV, social media scanning, and people or machines. Noise isn’t always about sound, either. Sometimes, noise comes in the form of ideas or opinions coming at us, whether we want them or not. This gives us a “noisy mind” even without any exterior sound!
Sometimes, noise comes in the form of feelings rolling through and around us. These noises interfere with our ability to listen to our own emotions. Even spiritual and physical aspects of our lives can also be noisy. Sometimes, all five together—sound, mind, emotions, spirit, and body—create a cacophony of noise in and around us. I know from experience that when that happens, it is easy to lose the center that grounds me and my work.
The experiment on this vacation is to live with less noise and distraction. For today, I am not checking my emails, news feeds, or social media, nor am I having TV run in the background. Instead, I choose to read, walk in nature, and listen to the waves gently lapping the shoreline and the wind and rustling leaves of the trees outside my rental.
Stay tuned (pardon the pun!) for next week. I’ll let you know what I’ve learned from this new experiment, including what emerges in an environment with less man-made noise and more nature-made sounds. Maybe you’d like to try it as well!
