You Have Been Adding Noise on Purpose

There is a background hum in your life that you put there. The podcast on the drive. The phone picked up within seconds of sitting down. Music the moment you walk into the house. You have built a wall of input so thick that you have not sat in silence in weeks — maybe longer. If someone asked, you would say you like learning, or you like music, or you get bored easily. But something else is happening. You are filling every gap because there is something in the gap you do not want to hear.

It is not dramatic. It is not a crisis. It is usually something ordinary — a conversation you need to have, a thing about your health you have been ignoring, a slow mismatch between what you are doing and what you know you should be doing. It has been there a while. It surfaces in the quiet, so you stopped allowing the quiet. The fix is not complicated. Ten minutes with nothing playing, nothing open, nothing to do. What comes up first is restlessness. What comes up second is the thing.