The Song Beneath The Song
I enjoy walking wooded trails whenever I can. There is something about trees that seems to slow the mind without asking anything in return.
One morning, I noticed that nearly everyone I passed wore headphones. Some were listening to music. Others were talking on the phone. A few looked down at a screen as they walked, never once lifting their eyes toward the forest around them.
For a moment I wondered why someone would come all this way only to bring another world with them. Then I smiled. The truth is, I wasn’t really any different. Long before smartphones, I found countless ways to avoid silence. I stayed busy. I planned tomorrow. I replayed yesterday. I read another book. Turned on the television. Filled every empty moment with something.
The mind is wonderfully creative when it doesn’t want to be alone with itself. Perhaps that is why silence feels so uncomfortable at first. When we finally stop distracting ourselves, the first thing we often hear isn’t peace. We hear the unfinished conversations. The old regrets. The worries. The fears we hoped activity would drown out. No wonder we reach for something to fill the quiet.
Meditation taught me to stay anyway. Not because silence immediately became peaceful. But because I slowly discovered that the noise wasn’t coming from the world. It was coming from my own mind. And beneath that noise… there was something else. The wind moving through the pines. A woodpecker somewhere beyond the bend in the trail. Leaves whispering to one another. The steady rhythm of my own breathing.
None of those sounds had suddenly appeared. They had been there all along. I simply couldn’t hear them until I stopped listening to everything else. Perhaps awareness is like that. It is not something we create. It has been quietly present beneath every thought, every worry, every distraction. Waiting patiently… like a song beneath the song.
Sometimes the deepest silence is not the absence of sound. It is the moment we finally begin to hear what has always been there.
