I bet I’m not the only one who hears the noise. I’m sure you do, too. That thing beaming off your phone. The buzz from the streets outside your room. The looming feedback from other people. The high-frequency screech in between thoughts. The sounds of anxiety. The expectations. The bullshit. The noise.
This is the same sound I’ve been hearing a lot of lately. It’s the sound of being busy. It’s the sound of constant activity and restlessness. This has been a trending mood for me recently. Having a day-job and some side-hustles, while trying to keep relationships healthy, has exposed me to so much stimulus and so much out of my control. At some point, it gets so loud, you can no longer hear yourself clearly.
I’m reminded of this scene from the show Peaky Blinders, which I thought was so good and relatable that I had to pause it and watch it again.
But first, a bit of context on the show. Peaky Blinders is set in the small 1920s industrial town of Birmingham in the UK. At the time, family gangs ruled most of the businesses (factories, horse-racing, etc.). This was right after World War I, where protagonist Tommy Shelby, along with his brothers, fought in France as a tunneller. Now back from the war, he leads the Shelby family (it’s more of a gang, really) bookmaking business, while dealing with rival families and some serious PTSD from the war.
In Season 1 Episode 2, there’s a scene where Tommy rides an unnamed white horse he won from a rival family over a coin-toss game called Two-up. He rides it over the crudely-paved street where the Shelby Company is on. To their right is a construction site that occasionally spits out these large fireballs and some bits of coal towards the road. It’s a hazard for everyone, but no one seems to mind.
Just as they pass by this construction site, a coal machine lets out this huge burst of flames that scares the horse. In a panic, the horse raises its two front legs and neighs in fear, while Tommy unseats himself to calm it down. He walks towards the horse’s head, pulling the collar rope towards him, and whispers to it.
“Easy boy,” he shushes it, his face just two inches from the horse’s, “in France we used to say, it’s just the music hall band turning up. It’s just trombones and tubas, that’s all. It’s just noise. It’s just noise, hey? It’s just noise. You get used to it. It’s just noise.”
There are two reasons for why the scene moved me so much. One, I thought it was an artful way to show what was going on in Tommy’s head. He suffers from a lot of trauma after the war, and hearing him say those words to a horse was like hearing him talk to himself. He knew that panic so well and the noise he was talking about was so familiar to him that he was so quick to relate that same fear to his own experience.
It’s a reminder that the pieces of advice that we give to other people are usually the same advice we need to hear ourselves.
Two, “trombones and tubas.” What a great image of the noise that we’re exposed to on a daily basis. It’s piercing, overwhelming, and not to mention, annoying. It seems there’s no escape. It doesn’t stop. As I was watching the scene, it felt as if Tommy was also speaking to me, and to anyone who can relate really. “You get used to it. It’s just noise.”
There are countless permutations to this noise, but they are all the same in that they all occupy valuable space in our heads. They distract us from the things that really matter.
Noise is the trauma from the war. It’s the bad grade from the test we could’ve studied harder for. It’s the opportunity we missed because of fear. It’s the criticism from the one person whose opinion matters most. It’s the voice in your heads taunting us, “you suck, everyone knows it, but no one cares enough to tell you the truth.” It’s the failed business you can’t seem to get over. It’s regret. It’s rejection. It’s feeling inadequate and believing it.
Noise is the feedback loop, the screech we hear when we point the microphone back at the speakers. It lingers, and the only way through it is, well, there really is no one-size-fits-all remedy.
Sometimes, you have to discern which sounds are just noise and which ones are actual music worth listening to. Ignore the noise and let the music play louder. Dance to the beat while you’re at it.
On other, less fortunate moments, the only way to get to silence is to let the band finish playing. Some things just need to be heard, but not necessarily listened to. If you know it’ll end soon enough, let it play. And then let it die out. When there’s light at the end of the tunnel, it’s worth the wait.
But so far, my go-to way of dealing with the noise is to hit pause for a while. Some of it won’t stop anytime soon. Some won’t stop ever. So we go on that break. We take that nap. We set the date with an old friend. We blast the playlist we created for moments like this. We rest, until we can hear our own selves again. And then we can face the noise.
But if all that fails, there’s comfort in knowing that even the most put-together and stable-looking people hear the same noise as we do. We’re all in some theater, listening to some band. Maybe we can switch theaters, or take a break and enjoy the air outside, or learn to enjoy the music. Or maybe, we can simply enjoy each other’s company, until the noise fades into the background.