The Big Three: The Sound of Silence

The world can be a crazy place. Sometimes it helps to step back and list a few of the things you’re grateful for. This year, I’m making it a habit to list three blessings each week. Here’s what I’m grateful for this week, March 2 – 8.

What I’m grateful for:

—Stillness. My wife wasn’t feeling the best recently and she decided to go to bed early. I was working on an email for work. The lone noise was the sound of the letters on my keyboard snapping to attention when I called them. When I was done, I was amazed by the stillness of the house. There was no TV. No music. No irritating drips of water from the faucet, even gurgling noise inside my stomach decided to take a break. The only thing I heard was silence.

I closed my eyes and sat still in our living room for forty minutes. I passed the time thinking about all the different ways song writers have talked about silence in songs like “The Sound of Silence,” “Enjoy the Silence,” “Quiet Storm,” “Our Lips Are Sealed” and millions of others.

And I felt a deep calmness.

—Jazz and Marching bands. When my youngest son was in high school, he played trumpet in his marching band. The song, Big Noise from Winnetka, was part of their routine and I got to hear it on regular basis.

Push down on the fast-forward button a few years and I hadn’t heard the song in a long time. This week the song somehow came across my Spotify playlist and I was instantly taken back to my son’s band competitions and high school football games.

I couldn’t have come up with a better song choice for the moment if I tried. Yes, definitely some big noise!

—Bouncing off the walls. When I was a kid, I was a literal thinker. For the time, I guess it served me well. I followed my parent’s directions to the letter of the law. So, I was in for a surprise when I first heard someone use the idiom that their kids were “bouncing off the walls.”

For the longest time, I thought the kids were literally bouncing off rubber walls and ceilings. Wouldn’t that be a fun pastime? Hit the wall . . . bounce back five feet. Touch the floor, rise up like heat rising to the rafters.

Here’s to the English language and our crazy idioms and phrases!

What gave me a smile?

In late December astronomers picked up 2024 YR4, a city killer asteroid, that was thought to have a slight chance of impacting Earth in 2032. Astronomers estimated the asteroid to be 130 to 300 feet wide and once estimated the probability of hitting Earth to be as high as 2.8%.

With more time and advanced tracking, astronomers have now confirmed that the asteroid poses “no significant impact risk” to Earth. Yes, we can all let out a deep breath. The asteroid was close but no cigar. Thank goodness.

The Earth is in the clear, but with the new information, the odds of the asteroid hitting the Moon have risen from a small fraction of a percent to somewhere between 1% and 2%. Astronomers will continue to watch that closely.

And to think most of us are horrible about how close we are to the trash can when we’re backing out of the driveway. Oh, the lessons of science.