When the Power Dies, the Mind Gets Loud
The power went out for three hours last night, and without the hum of fans, the drone of traffic, the constant electronic whisper that defines our lives, the silence felt deafening. Arash couldn’t fall asleep without his usual backdrop of noise, and I understood why—silence forces us to hear ourselves.
In true quiet, thoughts become unavoidable. The anxieties we drown out with music, the worries we mask with television, the questions about purpose and mortality that constant noise helps us postpone—they all surface in silence like bubbles rising to the surface of still water.
We fill every moment with sound because silence reveals the chaos inside our heads. We’ve become so used to external noise that our internal noise becomes intolerable. Meditation teachers spend years helping people become comfortable with the cacophony of their own minds.
Yet we crave what we fear. We pay to visit places advertised for their peace and quiet. We describe silence as golden, as healing, as something we desperately need. Deep down, we know that constant stimulation is exhausting us, that our nervous systems need rest from the assault of sound.
The silence we crave isn’t empty—it’s full. Full of subtle sounds usually masked: our own breathing, the wind in trees, the distant call of birds. Full of space for thoughts to complete themselves instead of being interrupted. Full of the possibility for genuine rest instead of distraction disguised as relaxation.
We’re afraid because silence demands presence. It’s impossible to escape yourself in genuine quiet. All the activities we use to avoid self-confrontation become unavailable. We’re left with the raw experience of being conscious, of being briefly alive in an infinite universe, of carrying questions we can’t answer and mortality we can’t escape.
But this is also why we need it. In silence, we remember who we are beneath the roles we play, the noise we make, the constant doing that substitutes for being. Silence strips away everything except the essential fact of awareness itself.
The deepest irony is that the silence we fear is the silence we came from and will return to. We’re afraid of our own origin and destination, spending our brief time between silences avoiding the very thing that gives meaning to sound, rest to activity, depth to our surface lives.
