On Sundays, I participate in Sunday Scribblings, a weekly writing prompt challenge. There are no rules within the challenge, however I am imposing the same rules that I follow for Five Minute Friday: Write for five minutes. No editing, revising, or over thinking. Just write.
Today’s Topic: Silence
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Complete silence hurts my ears. Really, it does. My ears ring when there is complete silence. I’m pretty sure that it has to do with listening to loud music through headphones when I was younger. I also think it might have something to do with never having lived without electronics and electrical items constantly running, like the refrigerator, fans and such. Have you ever noticed how silent your house is when the electricity goes out? Yeah, that. It’s deafening to me.
I first discovered how important it is to always have some sort of sound nearby when I went to college. My college roommate slept with a fan running at night. At first I thought it was weird to have a fan running when it wasn’t hot in our room, but little did I know that I got used to it. When I went home for Christmas, I had a hard time sleeping. It finally occurred to me that when growing up, I always slept well in the summer when I had a fan running all the time, and slept poorly in the winter when the fans weren’t running.
For several years now I have slept with a sound spa running all night…or whatever you call them. I switched from a fan to the sound spa when I found out that they exist, and they certainly make more sense than running a fan at night when it’s cold. I even have a white noise maker app on my phone to play when I travel, though I used to have a portable sound spa that I carried for travels before smart phones existed.
As much as silence may be therapeutic, for me complete silence drives me batty.
“Silence is one of the hardest arguments to refute.” – Josh Billings
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Read other Sunday Scribblings posts on the topic of ‘Silence’.
During the month of November, I am participating in the National Blog Posting Month, also known as NaBloPoMo, hosted by BlogHer. Most likely I am following these suggested prompts, but I might just get crazy and change things up every once in a while. I‘m one wild and crazy gal!
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I sleep like a baby with the radio on all night.I only like talk. But I’m wide awake if an interesting topic arises.
Total and utter silence is a bit creepy, almost unearthly but to need to have some artificial sound is interesting when some quiet can be so beautiful so long as it accompanied by some non intrusive natural sounds such as the buzz of insects or the wind blowing. I suppose that is what is so beautiful about us; which is our differences.
i totally get it – i cannot sleep in complete silence as well – i can appreciate and be awed by the absence of sound for a while (like when we were in Death Valley last December and the nights were awesomely silent) but I need white noise to sleep..
My thoughts and dreams are so noisy, I’m never without “comfort”!
I can relate! If it’s summer and not too hot, I can sleep with sounds of crickets and what not from outside, but I also have to have sound to sleep. Ever since I was a little girl I have been this way. When younger I used to sleep with a radio on or with a cd on repeat all night (at low volume). This was mostly because I needed something to help lull me to sleep. Now, as I am older it’s also because I am a light sleeper and tend to wake at any noises or voices. I use a variation of things depending on the night, but anything from a sound machine of waterfalls and what not, to a fan, to light music. Sometimes I just watch tv and put the sleep timer on it so that it will shut off when I fall asleep. On very rare occasions I will want to sleep in total silence. We had a power outage for several days one winter and since winter is so quiet anyways (especially with several feet of snow), it was really hard for me to sleep in that level of dead silence.