15 Minutes of Quiet – Or, How Do You Define "Quiet"?
The most noisy place on Earth is the one that never has a moment of quiet
A tractor on the pond?! Yes, in Sweden they have it.
In general, Swedes are extremely happy to make noise, in whatever way they can. Just today, there wasn’t any loud rehearsals in the amfitheater in one end of the park, but instead, two of these tractors were moving around, collecting plants from the water.
They were there too the last time I was in the park, two days ago. Still moving around in the same end of the pond, with plants accumulating in the other end.
Well, they probably do a needed job, since, in the tough summer heat and with the lack of rain we have experienced this year, there is still less of still warmer water in the pond, and the plants are growing fast – and so are the algea.
It’s not only the American president who sees problems with algea, also we simple people in Sweden do, but here it doesn’t cost millions to fix it. Just some noise.
Aside from that. Back to the title about 15 minutes of quiet.
Recently, I have started an improvement program for myself. I go for a long walk each day, to get away from the computer, for once, but also to get some exercise. What I experience from the world – all that resonance that makes me feel like I’m part of it – is also an important ingrediens.
Since I have a smart watch, and an app that belongs to it, and smart scales, and even a smart blood pressure meter, I am deploying these things in my escape from the automated world. A bit ironic, I know.
The smart watch can help me track how much time I spend on walking, how many steps, and how many kilometers. Then I have some help in setting goals, so that I’m not just cutting corners but actually try to do what can be considered enough. The scales, well, help me keep track on the weigth loss that is naturally happening, and for which I also set goals. And then there’s the blood pressure.
I don’t have problems with high blood pressure. I never had, even though that instrument will show different levels at different times, and, hence, it has during the years also shown me a couple of potentially problematic measurements. So, just because I have it, and because I want to make sure that when trying to get healthier, this will also be tracked, I use it.
It generally requires me to sit down at a table, wait 10 minutes, doing nothing, and then do the meassurement cycle, which consists of three meassurements with some time in between, and the average is then the result. The app most practically catches this itself, and it will then tell me if I’m healthy or not.
10 minutes of doing nothing is probably healthy in itself. We should all do that now and then. But another requirement is that I don’t hear music, don’t watch TV or read or generally do anything else. I should allow the body to rest completely, with not distractions at all.
And here comes the problem. 10 minutes. Not a lot of time, I would think. But I can’t find 10 minutes during a day where there is no music and no other distractions.
Today, it started well. I sat down at the kitchen table, to sit calmly for 10 minutes, having the instrument ready in front of me. I even closed my eyes, feeling that it was nice, almost like meditation. 10 seconds into the session, however, a neighbor started beating on something. Some children downstairs started shouting, some adults too, and then loud music appeared from there as well. And the shouting, beting, and music got turned up several times during the 10 minutes.
Outside, on the street that runs along my building, the traffic was noisy. There’s a traffic light just outside, and that makes vehicles stop, and then speed up, sometimes insanely, when starting again. Some of the stopped vehicles rev the engine, like if they want to prepare for the quickest start possible. And many vehicles are broken or malfunctioning in some way, so they make a lot more noise than needed.
A few years ago, I didn’t hear them. I had better windows then, with three layers of glass that effectively kept out the noise, plus, the road was new then and less trafficed. Then the windows were changed to 2-layer ones, and now I hear the traffic all the time.
Well, the 10 minutes passed, and I put the blood pressure meter on my arm, started it, closed my eyes – and the people downstairs then increased their noise level even more.
I found that the result today was a higher pressure than the last time I measured, when the world around me for a moment was surprisingly quiet – meaning, there was noise, but less – and I couldn’t help thinking that the neighbors and the traffic may have had an influence on the result.
This morning I got up early, so I managed to get up ahead of the noise from the power tool outside. On other days I’m not so lucky. I estimate that way more than half of all days throughout the year has power tools stealing the quiet of the mornings. That can be everything from a neighbor using a drilling machine to a tractor or an over-motorized leaf blower, or a gigantic lawn mower outside, but this very morning, it was a grass edge-cutter equipped with a modest moped-sized motor. It did make a lot of noise, though.
When I then went out for my walk to the park, I met another, similar, device 200 meters further ahead – a more powerful one this time – and a bit later, a huge digging machine that instead of a showel had a hedge-cutter mounted and was cutting a long hedge in front of the soccer stadium.
Next, where the old soccer stadium had been, just after the current one, I counted something like 11 big machines, of which two were standing still, but the others were digging, crushing, or something else, all, of course, diesel-driven and making noise. Surprisingly little noise from those, but still clearly louder than any bird’s singing there might have been.
Then, in the park, two of the tractors on the water, as mentioned. And on the way home from the park, where I took another route, a large digging machine, this time equipped with a broom – I’m not kidding, a simple broom, like you could have used it on a stick, with your hands, but a larger size. And this noisy broom machine was spreading, slowly, some sand between newly laid tiles on a pavement. Two workers were standing next to it, doing nothing but looking, and the whole process could have been done both faster and less noisy if they had used an ordinary broom for the job, rather than the big machine.
I ended up at home without meeting any more machines, and could conclude that this was a quiet day. Some days, there are more machines operating, during more time. Swedes love the sound of machines, I guess.
And then the blood pressure measurement a bit later, ruined by noise.
“You can just do things late evening then, or in the night, or early morning, when the world is quiet?” – you might say.
He he – it doesn’t work this way here. At one neighbor they are talking very loud, several people, until late night. They and/or some other neighbors don’t know that oil can lubricate a door hinge, so their toilet door(s) are creaking loud every half hour throughout the evening and late into the night. At least two neighbors find that 2 or 3 a.m. are great times to shower, while beating the tubes in the process, and dogs are houling or barking, motorcycles and cars reving outside, etc.
The world is not quiet, ever.
It is not uniqe for Sweden, though. I think I have mentioned this before, but I once bought a CD with music by Morton Feldman. He was a somewhat experimenting composer, and this particular music didn’t consist of notes with breaks in between – it consisted of breaks with notes in between.
While it may sound, by words, like “same same”, it isn’t. Most of the 80 minutes the music on this CD lasts, is full of absolutely nothing, just interrupted by a low tone now and then.
He said himself that it was a bit unusual, so we humans weren’t used to hearing music like that. Therefore, an adaptation period was needed. About 60 minutes for most people. So, I imagined, if I could only find the 80 minutes for the whole thing, I would get 20 minutes of effective music enjoyment out of it.
Not so. I was living in Copenhagen then, later moving to a suburb, and later again back to Copenhagen – and then Malmö, Sweden. I have had this CD for some 30 years, and from time to time tried to listen to it. And I have never, ever, managed to find 80 minutes of quiet. Never that amount of time, anytime during the day or night, on any address, where the surroundings would stay calm and not make noise during 80 minutes.
Well, today, with the blood pressure measuring, I was hoping for about 15 minutes of relatively calm surroundings – the 10 minutes for relaxing, and another 5 for measuring. I got 10 seconds.
Afterwards, the people downstairs turned up their music even more, and I got angry. For some time, I have had my music system switched off, because electricity has become so expensive that I must try to save on it where I can. But today, I turned it all on – the class A/B amplifier, the NAS with the music on it, and my wish to play loud music to cover the noise from the neighbor.
It worked. Muse is, by their own definition, as loud as possible. And it made the neighbor give up. But, of course, I had no quiet either. Only the noise I had chosen myself.