One of the things I'm most grateful about living here is the peace and quiet it affords. Our nearest neighbours are some 400m away and we're mostly surrounded by fields. Being an agricultural area of course we get farm machinery, sometimes early in the morning, but it's not 24/7 and to be honest even a combine harvester isn't really obtrusive.
In the evenings at this time of year the air is filled with birdsong - we're lucky enough to be an area where skylarks are just about hanging on. Blackbird song is also one of my favourites too. Plus obviously I have my aforementioned noisy guinea fowl, the odd cock-a-doodle, cluck and quack. So it's not silent, but what it is is peaceful.
Being an introvert I need regular quiet space to recharge myself. I find a lot of man made noise too much or over stimulating. One of my biggest bugbears is continual music thudding in supermarkets. Firstly music, like art, is a very personal taste, and secondly I don't actually want to buy loo roll and baked beans to a backdrop of sex, heartbreak, materialism, violence or any of the other themes of modern music. Lets face it very few seem to be singing about how happy they are!
I doubtless sound like an old fogey, I actually like rock music but I think there's definitely a time and a place for it. Where we used to live we were subjected to various live bands each weekend in the pub opposite, and short of going out there was no escape from it. Months of it tends to wear you down and I have great sympathy for people who suffer in residential areas from noisy neighbours.
I think the need for quiet spaces is a fundamental human need. Over the last twenty years with the advent of population explosion, portable music, more cars and machinery we've effectively narrowed down opportunities for introverts to have quiet places. Even the last library I visited was far from quiet.
I know some people who basically can't function without a constant background drone of either TV, radio or stereo, and I often wonder if they're afraid of silence. With most built up areas, and even the countryside, becoming increasingly populated quiet is diminishing as quickly as we're destroying much else in the world.
Peace and quiet allows me to ground and centre myself, it helps me engage and be present in my surroundings. And I think that's perhaps the fundamental point - presence. When was the last time you were present in your surroundings without the distraction of anything else? If we are to save this planet we need more people in Western nations to slow down, be present rather than distracted, and appreciate what we've got or we're going to lose it all before we know it.
