Admittedly, I’m an unabashed anti-noise person. Even as a child I have always intensely disliked noise – I think because it’s so jarring. However, simply because you don’t like noise does not, ipso facto, make you a silence adherent. In my case it does.
I do enjoy the quiet because of all the things you can hear in it. (And that is not an oxymoron.) Sometimes it’s only in the quiet that you can hear all the sounds around you – leaves fluttering, birds chirping, squirrels discussing something or other, dogs carrying on a conversation, etc. It’s nature talking. You can even hear some of the man-made sounds – children laughing, people talking.
Question: is silence and quiet the same thing. Could be. Not necessarily. Webster’s definitions don’t give much further understanding. Quiet, according to Webster is: not noisy, silent, peaceful and relaxing. Silent is: still, noiseless, not active. The subtly of the definitions would reclassify me as a ‘quiet’ adherent. Not active doesn’t catch the nuances that quiet does. Noise, on the other hand, is defined as: din, a loud disagreeable sound. And this is where noise and quiet diverge and where individual definition prevails.
One’s preferences on this scale does dictate actions as well, at least those choices you have control over. And you have those muffling opportunities – perhaps a baroque composition playing in the background that masks the noise that is attempting to seep into your space. It’s interesting that we have the phrase… peace and quiet. We equate peace with quiet thus something to be cultivated and prized. However, there are many people who seem to need what I would consider noise. But to them the ‘sounds’ may be ‘music to their ears’.
