Relative Something

I was driving home late last night after my weekly session of floorball (floor hockey played with a wiffle ball) when all of a sudden I became aware that the radio was playing unnecessarily loud, and the song at the time was not one that appealed to me in the least. I shut the radio off. The immediate transition created an impression that the quiet was quieter than the song had been loud, if that makes any sense; along the lines of “a deafening silence”.

It reminded me of an exercise I devised years ago on one of the rest days during an annual week of biking and camping with about 150 dear friends. The object is to practice becoming aware of everything that is audible in a given period of minutes. The process involves acknowledging what sound is closest and most obvious, and then disregarding that in order to move on to focus on the next sound. The priority is to strive to be able to discern the next further distant sound, ultimately culminating in what would be the input you are detecting from a source the largest distance away from you. It is all speculation, but in terms of an exercise, the reward is in the doing, and not necessarily the data obtained.

It isn’t important to know what the sound is. Just becoming aware that it is something you are hearing at that time, and being able to file it and move on, serves the purpose of this exercise.

Often times, what I discover during this process is the space between the sounds. It is there that resides, the quietest of quiets.