The Quiet Cacophony

The Quiet Cacophony, yes it's an oxymoron if ever there was one, but I experience it most days.  There's rarely a day on the year when I am not up and about by 5.30am.  At the time of writing, mid August, the afternoon temperatures here in Turkey can approach 40 degrees C but at 5.30am it is usually in the mid 20s, relatively cool and for me a more physically active time of day.  That said, I usually start my day with a period of physical inactivity, enjoying a cup of English tea, whilst just sitting and thinking on my balcony.  It's the only cup of English tea I have during the day.  At this time of year and particularly if I'm working, cold water is far more refreshing.  There is, however, one hot drink I do enjoy from time to time, Türk çayı (Turkish tea).  It is served in small glasses, without milk, and although I'm not a 'sugar man', I always take one spoonful of sugar with my Türk çayı.  It's a fantastic flavour and, believe it or not, very refreshing even in the summer heat.

Returning to my morning quasi-meditation, I try to time it just before the sun rises, which at this time of the year is slightly later each morning.  So for example, this morning the sun rose at 6.21am and I had my tea at about 5.45am, well before the sun had made its presence known from behind the mountain, but when the sky was just beginning to transition from darkness to dimness.  This is when I am conscious of the 'quiet cacophony'.  If I sit, occasionally sipping my tea, letting thoughts drift into my mind and flutter out, often inviting other thoughts before departing, then it is the quietest time of the day.  The quiet environment, the comfortable ambient temperature and the English tea, combine to provide a very thought-productive experience - wonderful!  Thought productivity during that part of the day is a measure of the number of thoughts swilling around effortlessly in my mind.  It is definitely not, however, a time for converting thoughts into tangible actions, which requires mental effort.  So it is a time for relaxing, not exerting, the mind.  If you consider the analogy with the physical aspects of the body, we need sleep before and after physical activity.  Likewise, the mind needs relaxation between periods of mindful activity.

But what about the cacophony?  Yes there is one.  If I cease my quasi-meditation and just listen, there is a tremendous cacophony, a discordant mixture of sounds.  These include dogs barking, cockerels crowing, calls to prayer from local mosques, low frequency vehicle noises from a distant main road, farm vehicles travelling through the village, the start of the dawn chorus, the occasional aircraft coming into or taking off from the local airport and miscellaneous rural sounds.  In fact if I really concentrate on the cacophony, trying to work out the nature and origin of each acoustic signature, my quasi-meditation thought-productivity, would rapidly decline to zero!

I don't need to extol the virtues of the human brain but my morning experience is an example of our amazing mental processes.  We have the ability to concentrate our thoughts on something, to the exclusion of everything else.  Now I'm not suggesting I could relax my mind to the same extent when, for example, I am sitting in a busy cafe in the centre of Istanbul but even in that environment, it is possible to blot-out distractions.  It does raise two interesting questions, does the mind need a certain level of background noise to operate efficiently and would a truly silent environment be a major distraction in its own right?  Two questions I don't feel able to answer, but maybe there's an expert somewhere who will have an opinion.  Meanwhile I'll just continue to enjoy the start of each day!