The Ministry of Happiness

The best cure of the body is a quiet mind. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

The Happiness in Quiet

As I’ve been documenting recently I have made a huge change. Someone recently said that they didn’t think I could have possibly changed gears any more than I did going from living in San Francisco to moving to a town of less than a thousand deep in the Adirondack Mountains. And while there’s no way to measure, I’ve definitely made an extreme change. There are lots of changes, the amount of time to do anything is much, much longer. There are no Amazon lockers, no one day shipping, sooooo many things, including my new favorite pizza place, are closed on the weekends. Going to get snow tires, unsurprisingly they needed to order them and it will take a week. Sure, I can accelerate the pace of some things, but only if I drive a minimum of 40 minutes and typically an hour, one-way, which is not something you can do quickly after work or on your lunch hour. Happily, knowing this, my employer is pretty flexible.

The two things that I’ve most noticed that are really different are traffic, and noise. Traffic was a given, something that takes fifteen minutes to get to, is 12 – 15 miles away. In the San Francisco Bay Area, something that took fifteen minutes to get to was typically three miles away, unless it was on the other side of a bridge, during commute peaks, then it might be an hour away.

The traffic I had thought about, the noise I really hadn’t considered, but it’s significant. We’ve all had the experience of watching TV at night, going to bed and then flipping the TV back on in the morning. What always hits me is wow, why is the TV so loud? And there is an easy answer for that, particularly when you live in the city, your senses are assaulted all day, particular in respect to noise. People in offices, radios, car noises, sirens, airplanes, etc…all day long we deal with noise, so we need a larger TV volume at night. After sleeping in a fairly quiet environment for hours, your ears and brain re-calibrate and so you’re more aware of subtler sounds and don’t need the volume so high, in fact, the TV at that volume often feels like an assault on your senses.

This is of course not limited to sound but sight as well. We have so much light and video pointed at us all day. So our senses are getting hit all day, and this goes for smell as well, and to a degree touch. If you’re in a crowded subway car or walking on crowded streets you have lots of incidental contact. All in all, living in large communities of people attacks your senses all day.

But here in the Adirondacks, there isn’t so much noise. Less traffic, means less car noise. I’m driving less, so I’m not even dealing with my own car noise. In two weeks I’ve heard two sirens and hearing them was jarring. I haven’t heard a train or a plane. And today I did a hike to an old growth grove of white pine trees and the walk, even in a group was so quiet. It helped a little that it was lightly raining so even the leaves didn’t make noise as we walked. I’m enjoying the quiet very much.

All of my senses are getting assaulted less, or in very different and more natural ways. There are not so many screens around, not much light at all, (and I’m excited for the meteor showers about to happen), and while there are lots of smells. The smells aren’t garbage and car exhaust or all of the smells of the industrial world, instead it’s tree smells, pollens, the occasional musky smell of an animal and best of all today it was petrichor.

One of the things we don’t notice as urban dwellers, really urban dwellers at almost any size of city, is this constant assault on our senses and what it means, why would we, it’s completely normal. But this assault is beating on our nervous system. There’s a reason we all seek out quiet and calm spaces in the urban environment and why they feel so special, they are the only places we’re not under attack. I have really noticed, even in just two weeks, that living in a place with less light pollution, the smells of nature and less noise pollution, I feel calmer, I’m sleeping a bit better. All in all, my nervous system is calming down. It’s a welcome change and is definitely making for happy days my friends. ~ Rev Kane