Grateful for the world of sound

I remember clearly the top of the hill I was sitting in a parked car with my brother while we were watching thunder when I was a child. The thunder was relatively far away, but we could see it clearly. He told me to count seconds from the moment I saw the lightning strike up and see how far I'd come until I started to hear the rumble. Then I would have to multiple the seconds with 300 meters and I would know the approximate distance between the thunder and myself. As you might guess, it was possible to count this, because where light travels frigging fast, the sound is its extremely slow cousin. I was not older than 10, but this realization impressed me so greatly that ever since this moment I always count the distance between the thunder and myself.

Image: pixabay.com

There are so many sounds I'm grateful for: the impressive concert we randomly chose on YouTube, the beep of the dishwasher letting us know our dishes are clean, the sound of the coffee beans grinding and the sound the trampoline makes when kids are having fun. I'm grateful for every voice I hear, every clear note of music and the doorbell when we're expecting visitors, but some sounds are simply more dear than others.


Today when we were sitting at the lunch table, Filip was playing with his cup, pretending it's alive. The cup that Filip had made at school used to have two googly eyes, but it had lost both of them and the audience was well aware of this, which meant the cup was now blind and bumping into everything and falling off the table. Nate laughed so hard he had to gasp for air and Viv was accompanying him. I was sitting there and thinking this must be one of my favorite sounds in the world.

But whether it's a moment of giggle or the smoke detector singing its song while my husband makes pancakes, most of all I'm grateful I've been born with hearing and that it still works.

Sound is very much tied to emotions and I couldn't even fathom how different I would be as a person if I lacked the world of sound. I'm happy I get to hear all that the world has to offer, and I'm happy occasionally there is also the sweet wee hours of the morning like this one when all I hear is the sound of supposed silence (and the humming of the computer, the clock on the wall, the snoring upstairs, the car driving somewhere in the distance)... I'm grateful for it all.