In the Absence Of · Essay 01

What Silence Sounds Like at the Top of the World

By Jennae Michelle Tropea, RN

I didn't know how much background noise the world contained until I stood somewhere there was none.

Not somewhere quiet.

Somewhere silent.

There is a difference.

Quiet still has a refrigerator humming in another room. A car passing somewhere beyond the window. An airplane so far overhead that you barely notice it. The movement of people in another part of a building. Heat coming through a vent. Electricity doing whatever electricity does behind the walls.

We call those places quiet because we have become so accustomed to background noise that we stop consciously hearing most of it.

Then I went to the top of the world.

There are places outside Utqiaġvik, Alaska, where you can stand and hear almost nothing made by another human being.

No traffic in the distance.

No air conditioner.

No television bleeding through another room.

No music playing somewhere that you didn't choose to listen to.

No machinery reminding you that somewhere, somebody is doing something.

No notification arriving.

No conversation happening twenty feet away.

Nothing.

And I don't think I understood until then that silence isn't necessarily peaceful.

At least not at first.

Complete silence can be terrifying.

It is enormous.

There is something almost unsettling about standing in a place where the world has stopped demanding your attention.

Because when the world stops making noise, there is suddenly nothing left between you and yourself.

And then, somehow, the terrifying part becomes beautiful.

You begin noticing things that were always there but never had enough space to become noticeable.

Your own thoughts.

Your breathing.

The horizon.

The ridiculous enormity of the sky.

The fact that you are standing on this tiny piece of land at the edge of an ocean on a planet that continues spinning whether you answer another email or not.

Time feels different when nothing around you is insisting that it matters.

That silence stayed with me.

But I don't think I understood what it had taught me until I came back to the Lower 48.

Because after you experience the absence of background noise, you start hearing noise everywhere.

And I don't mean only with your ears.

There is so much here.

So many stores.

So many signs.

So many advertisements.

So many things to buy.

So many choices about things that probably never needed seventeen choices.

So many notifications.

So many things asking to be answered.

So many places we're supposed to go.

So many things we're apparently supposed to own.

So many ways we're told we should look, live, work, succeed, love, spend, accomplish and become.

And because all of it has always been there, it feels normal.

Background noise works that way.

You stop hearing it.

Living at the top of the world changes your relationship with necessity.

When access is limited, weather determines what is possible, distance is real, and you can't simply assume that everything you could possibly want will be available whenever you decide you want it, you begin noticing the difference between what you need and what you have merely become accustomed to having.

Then you come back.

And abundance looks different.

Convenience looks different.

Urgency looks different.

Even choice looks different.

You begin wondering how much of what fills our lives is actually necessary and how much of it is simply background noise we have never experienced long enough without to recognize as noise.

Lately, I've been thinking about this for another reason.

When I become extremely tired, something strange sometimes happens with sound.

Ordinary background noises begin seeming almost musical to me.

Not like having a song stuck in my head.

I know what that feels like.

This is different.

Sometimes I find myself wondering whether I am actually hearing music somewhere.

Tones.

Frequencies.

Something almost orchestral underneath whatever else is happening around me.

It can feel as though my exhausted brain is taking all the tiny pieces of ambient sound around me and arranging them into its own background music.

I don't know why it happens.

I'm not interested in pretending I know.

But it has made me think again about Alaska.

Because at Point Barrow, there wasn't enough background noise to turn into anything.

There was simply absence.

And maybe that's why the experience was so profound.

There was nothing for my attention to organize.

Nothing competing to become important.

Nothing asking me to decide whether it deserved to be heard.

There was just the world.

And me standing inside it.

I used to think that experience taught me what silence sounded like.

I'm beginning to think it taught me something else.

It taught me what noise sounds like.

Because once you've experienced its absence, you start hearing it everywhere.

You hear it in everything you've been told you need.

Everything you've been told deserves your attention.

Everything you've accumulated because everyone else accumulated it.

Everything you've continued doing because stopping never occurred to you.

Every expectation you inherited without remembering when you agreed to it.

Every obligation that somehow became permanent.

Every version of yourself you learned to maintain because somewhere along the way it became easier than asking whether you still wanted to be her.

Maybe that's what silence gives us.

Not answers.

Contrast.

And contrast can be uncomfortable.

Because once you recognize something as noise, you have to decide whether you want to keep listening to it.

Maybe that's why true silence can feel terrifying and beautiful at the same time.

It doesn't tell you what belongs in your life.

It simply removes enough of everything else that, for a moment, you can hear yourself deciding.

I didn't know how much background noise the world contained until I stood somewhere there was none.

Now I wonder how much of the rest of life works exactly the same way.

How many things do we believe are necessary simply because we have never experienced their absence?

How many things are taking our attention without ever receiving our permission?

How many parts of our lives did we consciously choose?

And how many simply became part of the background?

I don't want to eliminate every noise from my life.

That's not the lesson I brought back from the top of the world.

Some noise is music.

Some interruption is connection.

Some abundance is extraordinary.

Some convenience gives us freedom.

Some people are worth being interrupted for.

The point isn't to make life empty.

The point is to become capable of noticing the difference.

Between what adds something to your life and what merely occupies it.

Between what deserves your attention and what has simply learned how to take it.

Between what you chose and what you inherited.

Between what you need and what you've never thought to question.

Sometimes you have to experience the absence of something before you can understand the space it was occupying.

And sometimes you have to stand somewhere impossibly quiet to finally hear how loud your life has become.

— Jennae Michelle Tropea, RN