Just today I saw a picture from NatGeo on Instagram, and it was that of a tunnel. Strangely, I remember going through a lot of tunnels as a child, but I cannot recall any recent experience of the same. Yet, I do have this one distinct memory of what I used to do in the tunnels. I would use my tiny fingers to block my ears, and then hear the sound again, again block it, only to hear it again. It gave me some sort of joy. In that tunnel, little did I realise that me blocking the sound of the tunnel wasn’t actually silence.

Today, if I block my ears, I hear sounds that take me somewhere into a land of pensive thinking, it’s better than meditation, trust me. I block my ears, close my eyes, and I hear a sound that somehow represents chaos, but a good kind of chaos. Then why did I think that it was silence all those years ago? You’d say, because the tunnel had a kind of loud noise of its own. But don’t our surroundings also have a loud sound of their own?

Don’t our surroundings, our thoughts, the people around us, keep making noises in our head? Then how can we hear silence even in so much noise? Just like an external conflict might be noise, so would an internal one. I mean, why not? Nevertheless, do you know what I see when I hear the sound of silence? I see myself drifting away from the materialistic joys of life, I meet a different version of myself who doesn’t care about how many books or pens or colours she has, but how many chapters she has written, and how many colours she has painted on the canvas of the world.

Little did I know that that version of me existed. But it does. Why don’t you block your ears like we all did as a child and hear the sound of silence. Tell me what you see, because…why not? It could be the same as what I saw, but I believe that we’re all too unique and gifted to see the same things.

~ Muskaan Darshan

PS – Nobody has to be an expert at writing, I’d just like people to share 🙂