Finding Peace in a Loud World: The Power of Turning Down the Noise and Living Small

There are mornings when the world seems to gather beyond the windows like a great weather-beaten house upon the moor, every chimney breathing warnings into a gray sky, every unseen room harboring some fresh quarrel, calamity, prophecy, or grievance, while the wind itself appears burdened with tidings too dreadful to keep and too tiresome to hear.

Well.

That simply is not me.

My apologies to the Brontës.

Let me try that again.

There are days when the whole world seems determined to climb onto my front porch.

Politics wants a chair.

The news wants the rocking chair.

Social media has already dragged over a folding table and is shouting at everyone about something that happened three states away involving people I have never met.

Somebody somewhere is furious.

Somebody else is terrified.

There is apparently a crisis involving coffee, cows, weather, electricity, artificial intelligence, chickens, gasoline, the government, or possibly all of them at once.

And every person holding a telephone has somehow been promoted to Director of Emergency Broadcasting.

I used to listen.

Boy, did I listen.

If someone said the world was ending Tuesday, I wanted to know whether it would be before or after lunch.

Eventually I began to notice something.

The world kept ending.

Tuesday after Tuesday.

And yet Wednesday kept showing up.

That was when I began to suspect that maybe I did not need to attend every emergency meeting.

So these days I have developed another system.

I pour a cup of coffee.

I step outside.

Salty Dog wanders over and performs the morning inspection, which mainly consists of determining whether anything edible has appeared overnight.

Bluey usually has an opinion.

Bat Cat may be somewhere nearby pretending he has no interest in any of us while carefully monitoring the situation.

The garden sits there doing something remarkably radical.

Growing.

No notifications.

No press conference.

No breaking-news banner.

Just dirt, sunlight, water, and time.

Soon enough there may be hens wandering around complaining about matters of genuine importance, such as who got the largest piece of lettuce.

There is grain to grind.

Beans to cook.

Something around the house probably needs fixing.

Something always needs fixing.

And strangely, that helps.

Because tightening a loose screw is a real problem.

Pulling weeds is a real problem.

Figuring out why water is dripping where water should definitely not be dripping is a real problem.

Those things can usually be solved with your hands, a little patience, and occasionally language not suitable for the Sunday bulletin.

The internet offers another sort of problem.

Infinite problems.

Problems I cannot fix.

Problems occurring thousands of miles away.

Problems that may not even be problems by tomorrow morning.

Yet somehow I am expected to carry every one of them around in my pocket.

No thank you.

My pockets are already full.

Probably with screws.

Maybe a washer.

Possibly something I picked up three weeks ago because I knew I would need it later and now cannot remember what it does.

I am not suggesting we ignore the world.

That would be foolish.

We should know what matters.

We should help where we can.

We should care about our neighbors and communities and families.

But caring about the world does not require allowing the world to scream directly into our ears every waking minute.

Sometimes the healthiest thing a person can do is walk outside and remember the size of his actual life.

A porch.

A good dog.

Strong coffee.

A garden.

A few laying hens.

A grain mill sitting somewhere waiting for its turn.

People you love.

Work worth doing.

A neighbor who may need a hand.

A quiet prayer spoken without an audience.

Those things look small from the internet.

From the porch they look enormous.

I spent years thinking peace would arrive after everything settled down.

That was the mistake.

Everything never settles down.

There will always be another headline.

Another argument.

Another prediction.

Another person declaring that civilization has approximately seventeen minutes remaining.

Peace cannot depend on the world becoming quiet.

Sometimes peace is simply deciding which voices get invited onto your porch.

So I still look at the world.

I just do not let it run the house.

I check what needs checking.

I do what needs doing.

Then I put the phone down.

There is coffee getting cold.

The dog wants attention.

The garden needs water.

And somewhere nearby, Bat Cat is staring at me with the unmistakable expression of an animal who believes humanity has made everything unnecessarily complicated.

He may have a point.

The world can keep shouting.

Out here, the volume is lower.

And for a little while, that is enough.