Silence
How to find silence in the noise: a practical guide
Create small islands of silence in your day: phone away, minutes without stimulus, a walk, prayer or slow breathing. Silence is a practice, not a place.
Notifications, bills, news, opinions, car horns, the family group chat. Some days your head feels like a radio station playing every frequency at once. When life is in crisis, the noise gets louder, and that is precisely when you most need to hear clearly. This page is the practical guide; the short story with the same name is in How to find silence in the middle of the noise.
What to do now
- Start with five minutes. Silence doesn't need to be a retreat. Five minutes sitting down, no phone, no music, looking out the window or with your eyes closed, already makes a difference. Increase it little by little.
- Get the phone out of the bedroom. The first and last hours of the day are the ones that shape your mind the most. Don't start or end the day with a screen.
- Turn off notifications that aren't urgent. Almost nothing needs an immediate reply. Choose set times to check messages and email.
- Walk without earphones. A short walk, ideally near trees or water, helps turn down the inner volume.
- Use your breath. Breathe in counting to four, breathe out counting to six, for a few minutes. It's simple and helps the body leave alarm mode.
- If you have faith, use its practices. Prayer, reading, meditation, song: many traditions have ancient paths to inner silence. If you don't have faith, contemplating nature, writing and calm music play a similar role.
- Write down what the noise is saying. Sometimes the noise is a list of worries that just needs to get out of your head and onto paper.
- Know when the noise is suffering. If your mind won't switch off, if there are anxiety attacks or persistent insomnia, go to a primary health unit (UBS) or psychosocial care center (CAPS). To talk right now, CVV at 188.
When it happened to Bairo
For Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez, silence has a number: 1420.
Hydrogen, the simplest and most abundant element in the universe, emits a radio signal at an exact frequency, about 1420 MHz. It is with this signal that astronomers map the galaxies. So that this faint signal is not lost in human noise, the band from 1400 to 1427 MHz is protected by international agreement, under the International Telecommunication Union. There, no one transmits. One only listens.
Bairo calls this band the frequency of silence. It is not a device or a technique: it is a symbol. He says it was in a time of faith and silence, after reaching rock bottom, that he saw clearly what he wanted to build. And he took that silence as the foundation of everything that came after.
The path
The whole world agreed to leave one band of the spectrum in silence so that the universe can be heard. You can do the same with your day: protect a small band of time in which nothing transmits, so you can hear what matters. Bairo found there the image of who he wanted to be. Maybe you'll find your next decision there.
Over time, you'll notice that silence isn't just the absence of noise; it is presence. In the quiet minutes, you start hearing your own breath, your own ideas, your own questions again. That is where many important decisions ripen. Protect it the way one protects a band of the spectrum: with clear rules, every day, without negotiating.