To those who seek silence,  

There is a belief—a fragile, deceptive belief—that somewhere, somehow, quietness exists. That if one escapes far enough, buries themselves deep enough in solitude, or stills their mind with enough discipline, they will finally find it. But the truth is, quietness is an illusion. You will never know this until you become quiet yourself.  

The moment you sit in what you think is silence, you realize—there is no such thing. The world hums, vibrates, whispers beneath its breath. The wind murmurs through the trees. The walls creak as if sighing under the weight of time. Even your own body, the very thing you seek to still, betrays you—the steady rhythm of your breath, the pulsing of your blood, the subtle ringing in your ears that you had never noticed before.  Even in the most desolate places, there is sound.

And yet, in the modern world, we are so flooded with distractions that we do not even recognize the absence of quietness.  Noise has become our default state. The endless hum of technology, the constant barrage of notifications, the artificial voices that demand our attention—these things do not just fill space, they erase our ability to perceive true presence.  Social media, smartphones, and the digital world have not just taken our attention; they have stolen our ability to experience memory in its purest form. When noise never stops, reflection never begins.  

Memory itself is tied to quietness. True recollection happens in stillness, in the absence of external noise. But how can one remember when they are never still? How can one reflect when their mind is constantly being filled with artificial chatter? The ability to be alone with one’s thoughts has become a lost art, drowned beneath the never-ending stream of information.  

And what of death? If one cannot find quietness in life, can they find it in death? Perhaps not. For even then, the soul is energy, and  energy never truly rests. Frequency exists beyond the physical, and who is to say that the afterlife is not just another form of vibration, another realm of sound beyond what we can perceive? Silence, true silence, may not even belong to the dead.  

So, if quietness is an illusion, what is left?  Awareness. To recognize that you will never escape sound, that you will never truly silence the world, but that in understanding this, you can choose which sounds you allow into your mind. You can choose to hear yourself beyond the noise. And maybe, just maybe, that is as close as we will ever come to quietness.

William Joseph