Soundtrack of the Pandemic

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I like singular sounds, non-human sounds, the natural sounds. The spit of the Keurig finishing making a cup of coffee. The birds twittering around the feeder. The clink of the dog’s tags as he follows me room to room. I like the breeze rattling the umbrella on the patio, and really love the fountain in the backyard.  I could listen to water moving all day, every day, and never get tired of it. Moving water is company without intrusion.

These are the sounds that calm my brain.

Calming my brain is not the same thing as filling my heart.

I have lived with people for a long time now, married 24 years, with two kids who’ve been around for 18 and 16, years respectively.  These people fill up my heart, over and over. I would choose them at any price.

That said, they make a lot of noise.

First thing in the morning.

My husband never met a TV he didn’t want to turn on and leave on. In fact, I think he is secretly puzzled by the off button. Like, who would need that? And he likes TV’s, we have them in more rooms than I feel comfortable telling the number of. And when he is in the house, they are all on.

My son never met a door he didn’t want to slam shut. And rap music is not designed to be played at a low soothing volume. Door slam! ‘Where’s my laptop?’ the outraged 16 year old demands, as if my most secret entertainment is to hide it from him, as if I waited until he went to bed at 2 am, snuck in, found it, and slipped it under his clean laundry knowing he’d never look there, tip toeing back to bed chortling with glee.

My phone buzzes with a text from my daughter, newly installed in her college dorm on the east coast. I don’t respond quickly enough, and it rings this time.

So, the soundtrack of my day starts with noise. It starts with the overstimulating, overproduced TV feed of sports and ‘news’ and entertainment soundbites, even when I try to ignore them. The soundtrack starts with other people and their sounds, asking me for things, complaining when they’ve misplaced something.  And then, blessedly, they’d all be off, to work or school and the TV’s would all be turned off (I love the off button) and the sound of the fountain would rise to prominence again. For many hours.

Back to the small sounds, the non-human ones. The restful silence of a house with no other human energies swirling.

Do you have the patience to wait,
Till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving,
Till the right action arises by itself?
   -Lao Tzu

My mud only settles when I am alone for a big chunk of time. Without other people’s noises.

This soundtrack of silence, which is so central to my well-being, disappeared in March. When Shelter in Place happened, the clamor was no longer bookends to the day, confined to morning and evening, but instead present all day long. All. Day. Long. Clamor. Cacophony. Chaos in my brain. TV’s on. Doors slamming. Food requests. Zoom meeting interruption melt downs.

The soundtrack was literally a SOUNDtrack. Sounds, sounds, sounds.  Too much. So, I increased my time out of the house, longer runs, longer walks with the dog, longer bike rides. I instituted a ‘carffice’ (car office) in a local nature preserve, until it got too hot.

And then the air quality made even the outdoor escape impossible.

It felt ungrateful, as someone who took so long to find someone worthy of marriage, as someone who struggled for so long to have kids. I desperately wanted these people in my life. I love them beyond reason. As someone who finally got everything she wanted, how could I be resentful of them for their noise?

During this pandemic I’m grateful for so much, that jobs have not been lost in our family, that we are all healthy, that I am not quarantining with small children (I truly hope God has a special reward planned for you parents surviving with young children, I believe you are Fast-tracking to Nirvana). It seems silly to complain, it’s just that a break from other people’s noises feels vital for my brain’s functioning, and the breaks have been miniscule, if that, for many months.

I’m reminded of the research lab I worked in back in my twenties, studying stress induced depression. To test the theory that control over a stressor is what determines whether you get depressed or not, the researcher did yoked-rats experiments. Two separate cages, each rat with a wheel to run on, each rat hooked up to electrodes and experiencing the same amount of random electrical shock. The difference is that one rat could turn off the shock by running on the wheel, which he would figure out pretty quickly in a series of trials. When this first rat turned off the shock he turned it off for both rats (thus, they were yoked together). The second rat could try anything but nothing would turn off the shock because it was the first rat in charge of stopping the shocks for both of them.  The rats got the exact same amount of shocks, but one had control over stopping it and the other didn’t. Like riding in a car with someone blasting their music. Fun for them, maybe not so much for you.

The rat with control did not get depressed, The rat with no control did.

I realized I was too yoked to other people’s noises. We were all hearing the same noises but I had little control over them.

The answer, not a perfect one, but a good enough one, came surprisingly, in adding more noise. I rearranged our TV room to squeeze in a desk. I put a sign on the door, ‘WRITING!’ and I turned on music to drown out the other noises in the house. I found a playlist of movie soundtracks, adding a literal soundtrack to my life. Fight fire with fire, fight noise with noise. Themes from Gladiator and Star Wars and Harry Potter brought a sense of nobility to my work. It insulated me, and resurrected a sense of control over the noise, my fingers on the playlist, my choice of volume.

It’s working okay, most days. But I will be ever so grateful when the day comes that I am working at home, alone, accompanied only by the sounds of the birds and the fountain and the snoring of the dog. When my mud can truly settle, when the right action can arise by itself. 

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