Q: Quiet!

At night, when we turn off the TV in the bedroom, one of us always says, "Shh, TV! Shut the fuck up." I don't know when we started doing that but it has become a nighttime ritual. When thinking of the letter Q, I was trying to come up with a witty topic...but since I have been playing Word With Friends, all I keep coming up with is QI, but since I really don't know much about Chinese medicine or martial arts, that was not going to work. I kept coming back to the word quiet. That made me think about our nighttime ritual and then, just like that, I was flooded with things about silence, about quiet.

Shh, TV!

There are good quiets and bad ones, and both are different depending on a person's past experiences with silence. A good one is when all is so good and perfect, there is no need for words, no need to fill the silence. Because in that moment the silence is not perceived as a void as much as it is part of the perfect. Summer nights out on the porch, a drive home from a long day at work...even a moment in the shower when the water temp is just right. There are also good moments of quiet after sound. Like when you're with your family and you're reminiscing about the past. Someone starts a story, everyone chiming in with "their version of the events as they remember them"...then there's the punchline, the completion of the anecdote. Everyone laughs. After a short period of time, the room fills with the silence of everyone smiling, everyone remembering. feeling the memory and the warmth of the laughter. It's comfortable, serene, and sweet in that moment.

There are those quiet moments after a loud event, like a concert (or in our case, the casino). When we stay at Foxwoods, there's something so strange that happens when we get back to our room. There's this buzzing silence. It's funny because it feels like excitement but all you can hear is the sound of your blood in your ears. That post-noise quiet always makes me feel funny and slightly uneasy. Sometimes I think that it's never going to stop and I'll hear this blood rushing sound forever. Then I get all panicky and freaked out. But then we turn on the TV (thank GOD for TV) and the sound of the Discovery Channel displaces the buzzing...and the panic disappears and I can feel comfortable in my own skin again.

OMG OMG WTF Was THAT?!?!

Then there are the scary quiets. With 5 cats in our house, nighttime is never totally peaceful and serene. In fact, there are these moments when the cats do something that makes a loud noise (knocking everything off the fridge, knocking over a sculpture, etc) and I wake up at the end of that commotion, scared shitless. In that moment all I can hear is the quiet but I can't tell if there actually WAS a loud noise or if I was dreaming it. So I lay there and listen. I figure if it's the cats I won't hear anything but if it's a killer, I'll hear footsteps or something...I have a very active imagination at night. When I don't hear anything, I am relieved. Until I say to myself, "What if it's a really good killer and the reason why I can't hear anything is because he has hold-still ninja abilities....waiting for an innocent victim to get up and patrol the house, unknowingly walking directly to their death?". So then I wake Jim up and make him go look. I figure he could hold the guy off long enough for me to call 911. When he comes back upstairs, he says: The cats knocked (Insert Object) onto (Insert Surface) which made the noise, OK? And I say OK and lay back down, imagining Jim walking past a dark corner to yell at the cats, not seeing the killer ninja in the shadows. So then I have to lay there and listen for ANYTHING that could be a killer...until I fall back to sleep.

Those are some of MY quiets? What about you? Do have your own good and/bad quiets? Comment and share your quiets with me.

 
Enjoy a moment of quiet today,
Dana C.