I have been living a very quiet life of late and loving it. I find myself doing things that add to the intensity of the quiet and its related sensation, order.  For example, my daughter (a university student who lives with me) was out most of yesterday completing a final project with her team and I used the time to clean the house. I even remade the bed just so that everything would be neat, smoothed out and orderly. Then I climbed into the bed with a book and a mug of tea.

Oh so wonderful, the silence and order.

The consequence, though, is that I reach perceptual overload rather easily these days. I drove to the library this morning and found Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” on the radio and was listening as I drove. I love the piece but when it came to an end I had to turn off the radio since I found myself jittery from the power of the music. The quiet came down with a bit of a slam and I took a breath. The dark silence in the car was cool, like iced lemonade in the shade on a very hot day. I drove this way for the rest of the trip.

After errands I came to the coffee shop I most often frequent. Inside I found a young mother with two very small children, both of whom were noisy. Ack. Not only that she was one of those young women who was a cheerleader in her high school days (I know that because she found the opportunity to list her 18-year-old self’s accomplishments to her friend). She had the most annoying, perky voice. Her entire conversation was about her soft stomach (she just gave birth some 8 weeks ago), her husband’s hard working ways, the perfidy of the people in her church for not talking to her mother, and how her husband is going to be gone for the next 8 weeks or so. Gads.

It took me 20 minutes after she and her children left to feel the quiet again. Not her fault of course, she can talk about whatever her friends will tolerate, but it does speak to my intolerance of too  much noise. In my past I have often used music played very loud to manage overload. When on the edge of people overload (I have a really hard time being too close to other human beings, I get really jittery and my head gets rapidly overfull with sensation), I used to plug in my headphones and jack up Rammstein or Icon of Coil and use it to calm down, but I find this is not tolerable any longer. Now it seems that only silence will do. That, of course, could be problematic since the human world is hardly a silent place, and I haven’t found a way to manage the sheer volume of noise we people produce.

Oh well, perhaps another methodology will present itself in time.