Maybe a Quiet Life Is Just a Life With Fewer Things Yelling at You

I used to think the opposite of a loud life was a peaceful one.

Now I think the opposite of a loud life is just a life with fewer things yelling at you.

Those are not the same target, and chasing the wrong one is how I ended up exhausted in a very calm-looking room.

Because a lot of things yell.

Notifications, obviously, but that's the easy one, the one everyone already blames.

The quieter yelling is worse.

A deadline I ignored two weeks ago that's still technically due.

A closet I've started avoiding like it owes me money.

Subscriptions I forgot I had, renewing themselves in the dark.

People who expect a reply within the hour because I trained them to expect that, once, in a moment of misplaced enthusiasm.

A dentist appointment I have not scheduled and think about roughly every third day, which is somehow worse than just going.

Twenty-seven tabs open on my laptop right now, each one a small unfinished decision.

Financial things I don't want to look at, which don't go away for not being looked at, a fact I know and routinely ignore anyway.

Social obligations I said yes to before I understood what I was agreeing to.

The news.

The algorithms quietly deciding what I'm anxious about this week.

And underneath all of it, my own ridiculous expectations, which yell the loudest and are the hardest to trace back to an actual source.

None of that gets fixed by a candle.

I want to say that plainly, because I spent a long time hoping it would.

Here's what I've landed on instead.

Sometimes the answer is a boundary, an actual one, said out loud to a person, not just decided privately and hoped into existence.

Sometimes it's rest, real rest, not the productive kind that's secretly still performing.

Sometimes it's acceptance, the harder skill, letting a thing be permanently a little bit irritating instead of demanding it resolve.

Sometimes, and I think this might be the most useful, you just need to deal with the thing.

Schedule the appointment.

Close the tabs, or actually read them, one of the two.

Cancel the subscription.

Say the boundary sentence to the person's actual face.

Open the closet and let today be the day.

Not because dealing with it is a spiritual practice, and not because you'll feel transformed afterward.

You probably won't.

You'll just feel like someone who has one less thing yelling at her, which turns out to be its own kind of relief, quieter than any ritual I ever bought into.

That's the real version of quiet living, I think.

It was never only about adding peaceful things to a life that already had room for them.

Half the job is subtraction.

Finding the friction and removing it, one unglamorous errand at a time, so what's left has some actual air around it.

I still want the quiet.

I just know now it's mostly made of things I dealt with.