Sometimes, the quietest moments are the loudest ones.
When the hum of traffic fades, when the refrigerator clicks off, when everyone else has gone to bed, there’s still something left: a faint ringing, the pulse in your ears, maybe even the creak of the house adjusting.
We call that silence, but it isn’t really silence at all. It’s the background of our existence finally stepping forward.
Some weeks ago I posted this haiku:
座禅して沈黙の音大きくて
zazenshite chinmoku no oto ookikute
sitting in zazen
the silence—
so loud
Most of us live surrounded by sound: music, conversation, engines, screens. Constant input. Perhaps surrounded by all this noise, we imagine silence as its opposite: nothing happening at all. But the truth is the opposite. When the noise stops, we finally hear just how much is going on.
A dripping faucet. Traffic in the distance. Some insect noise. A cat meowing. A breath catching. A mind rehearsing tomorrow’s worries.
It can be unnerving the first time you notice it. You realize that silence exposes rather than hides.
That’s why meditation can feel loud at first. The mind rushes to fill the gap. It throws up random thoughts, memories, to-do lists, songs you haven’t heard in years, regrets that are decades old about something that happened in elementary school. This is why most people who try meditation almost instantly give it up, deciding that it’s too difficult and something that only monks in Shangra-La could actually do.
But if you stay with it long enough, if you actually make the effort, the chatter changes texture. It’s still there, but you start to hear it as just another sound, like wind through grass.
When you really listen, the world reveals its small symphony:
- the whisper of air vents,
- the rhythm of your own breathing,
- distant footsteps muffled by carpet or tatami.
There’s a fragile peace in that awareness. The quiet doesn’t erase the noise, it exposes it and reframes it.
Maybe that’s all mindfulness is: not chasing silence, but learning to hear everything more clearly.
Do you ever notice new sounds when everything else stops? What’s the quietest sound you’ve ever heard?
[This post is continuing themes I've been writing about for the past two days. If you enjoyed this post, look back at the previous two I wrote.]
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David is an American teacher and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at laspina.org. Write him on Bluesky. |
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