Dearest Darling Friends,

 

I live near a busy intersection.

 

Every morning, the world outside announced itself without invitation…

 

• Horns slicing through the air like impatient blades,
• Loudspeakers during festivals turning devotion into a decibel competition,
• Neighbours whose arguments spilled out of windows and into the street like water from a cracked pot.

 

The city spoke loudly, constantly, without punctuation.

 

For years, I thought that was the noise I needed to escape.

 

But somewhere along the way — I couldn’t tell you exactly when — I noticed something stranger.

 

I would be sitting in a noise proof room, in a room with no traffic sounds, no loudspeakers on the road outside, no raised voices around me. Yet, inside, it was rush hour.

 

The inner city never sleeps, does it?

 

There was a whole orchestra playing in there.

 

• The ghost of a conversation I had three years ago, still wishing and rehearsing its lines.
• The phantom of a future that hasn’t arrived yet, already demanding I fret about it.
• Regrets that loop like a song stuck on repeat.
• Anxieties that hum like a old AC unit on the wall.

 

No one else could hear THIS noise pollution.

 

This was the other noise pollution.

The kind that doesn’t need a source outside you.

The kind we carry like small items we forgot we were carrying in our luggage.

 

The way the sun rises slowly in the horizon, I slowly began to notice something fantastic..

 

When the storm inside me was raging, even birdsong felt like an intrusion.
But when I found even a sliver of stillness within — something shifted.

 

• The horns outside became background.
• The loudspeakers faded to texture.
• The world’s loudness stopped being an attack and started being just… weather.

 

The outer world hadn’t changed.
Not even slightly.

The intersection was still chaotic.
The city was still the city.

 

But I had changed my relationship with the noise inside.

 

I think of it like this.
The inner noise is the tuning fork.
Whatever frequency it vibrates at, the outside world resonates in kind.

 

Tune the inner instrument to chaos, and chaos is all I hear everywhere I go.
Find even a moment of inner quiet, and I discover that the world was never quite as loud as I assumed.

 

I have not mastered this. Not even close.

 

Some mornings the internal traffic is still gridlocked, and I mistake it entirely for an outer problem.

 

I look for things to fix, people to blame, circumstances to change — when really, the chaos is happening inside.

 

Slowly, I am learning to ask a different question before I react with frustration.

 

Which noise is actually bothering me right now?
Is it the world outside of me — or is it the world inside of me?

 

Because one of them, I have very little control over.
The other one? That’s where the real work lives.

 

• That’s the garden worth tending.
• That’s the room worth returning to.

 

Peace, I am finding, isn’t the absence of noise.
It’s learning to be the eye of your own storm.

 

I would love to ask — when did you last check in on your inner noise levels?
What helps you find that chaos inside?
How do you convert it into a quiet centre?

 

Drop it in the comments. I read every one.

 

With love, prayers and best wishes,