Reset

Most days, the quiet I find myself craving eludes me.

My children will often ask if they can play some music while doing chores or homework or playing a game and , regardless of my answer, my gut response is constantly: NO.

I used to surround myself with music. Opera and show tunes were my jam, but really I was a genre junky; a lyric lover, I would study how words change and transform when set to melody, rhythm. But these days I find myself asking, begging, shouting, crying for more quiet. Sometimes I can’t hear myself think above the din of my kitchen table. Sometimes my thoughts are so deafening I need you to repeat what you just said. Again. Sometimes even the sounds of my childrens’ laughter is enough to grate my nerves… this is when I know I need to self assess. Because I am losing myself in this sea of perpetual, unrelenting sound.

Phone calls. Conversations. Siblings bickering. Dogs barking. Alarms. Timers. Internal dialogue.

All. The. Time.

Haptics and pings and Alexa announcements and advertisements and appliances… I try to reset with “Calm My Dog,” and other calming music for spa or meditation. White noise. Brown noise. Pink noise. A prayer. A meditation. A mantra. But sometimes what I really need is one, intentional tone to reset everything, one singular strike of a singing bowl or tuning fork whose frequency fractals rectify the physical and cellular space I occupy. No words. Just sound, working it’s vibrational magic into the fiber of my being so that I can make sense of the constant signal input I am bombarded with daily, the cacophony of life, and find myself again.

In this new year, and each new day, may we be mindful of the invitations to reset. And when we can not hear them over the raucous pandemonium of the day to day, may we be willing to be invitation initiators, disrupting the chaos with a single note of clarity, and ushering in the peace necessary to sustain vibrant living.