A personal essay
I was born in a city, and I've lived in cities my whole life. There's a particular drone that comes with that: traffic, air conditioning units, distant construction noises, the hum of a few million people going about their day. It's been part of my life for so long that I stopped hearing it.
That changed, briefly, when I moved to Bali.
I remember thinking the flight must have reset something in my ears. Walking through rice fields for the first time in years, I noticed the quiet—really noticed it, the way you notice a smell you'd forgotten. But here's the strange part: it didn't feel different from the quiet I knew back home. It felt like the same silence. I didn't yet have a category for anything quieter than what I already knew.
I found out I did, months later, back in the city.
I needed to take a call with a friend, somewhere quiet enough to actually hear him. I was at a mall, so I went looking, and ended up in a small cafe tucked away in a corner—the kind that remote workers claim as their unofficial office sometimes. It was quiet. Genuinely quiet. Quieter, even, than my own apartment.
Then he said something that made me second-guess everything I thought I knew about silence.
"I can hear SO much noise from your end."
I froze for a second, confused. I was in the quietest place I could find. I'd chosen this specifically because it was quiet. But sitting there, phone to my ear, I started actually listening—not just hearing, really listening—and I realized: the espresso machine two tables away. The low murmur of two other quiet conversations. The air conditioning. A chair scraping somewhere behind me. None of it registered as noise to me, because it was so far below whatever threshold my brain had set as "loud." I had recalibrated so completely to city sounds that this — a bustling café — was my silence.
It made me wonder what my friend was actually hearing on his end. What true quiet sounded like to him. And it made me wonder, uncomfortably, what I'd actually been hearing—or not hearing—for years.
That's the part that stayed with me. I hadn't found silence in that cafe. I'd found my version of it—a silence so relative, so adjusted to a lifetime of ambient noise, that it didn't even resemble the real thing anymore. And if I couldn't trust my own sense of what quiet sounded like, what else had my ears quietly agreed to stop noticing?
I think about that call sometimes when I think about what a silent retreat actually offers. It's not just an absence of talking. It's a chance to find out how far your baseline has drifted—how much you've been tuning out just to function—by finally being somewhere with nothing left to tune out.
What would you hear, if you actually had the chance to listen?