Seeing past the noise

Sat, Apr 18, 2020

Another day of lockdown. Another day of traffic free roads, blazing sunshine and birdsong echoing in the trees. The allotted time spent on the bike, spinning on the quiet roads, looking longingly at the familiar mountains but loving every mile of the ride.

No-one seems to know how this will go. Vaccine by end of next year. Vaccine by September. Tracking, tracing, isolating. It’s the natural world that is benefitting. Clean air, empty roads, a landscape lacking in human noise. At the half-way point I stopped and listened for a full ten minutes to a blackbird singing in the conifers. The absence of traffic roar evens brings out the myriad shades of green across the edge of the forest. There must be a part of the mind that’s swamped and thumped down by the incessant noise generated by humans. When that noise no longer exists, it’s like having a gauze pulled from the mind and the real world appears. It was always there. We just couldn’t hear it.