For a few minutes there was a bird chirping. I’m not sure why it started and I’m not sure as to why it stopped; what I know is that it was chirping and now it is not.

The bird does not seem to have flown away. Maybe it did and I did not hear it leave, but maybe it remains there, waiting for something. Maybe it is looking for something rather than waiting for that something to appear. Likely it flew away to look for that something.

The sound of cicadas now has arrived and they ring out loudly before they become a background hum before coming to the foreground briefly before moving back again, and it’s almost like waves of various intensities crashing on the shoreline.

Are these things to think about? Probably, but most likely beyond surface gestures, so probably not by me. Probably by other people. Still, sometimes surface gestures are nice, or maybe they are nice a lot of the time and I’m just overthinking this now.

Trying to think about how the day will pan out and I wonder if there will be other sounds that I’ll hear that I’ll find pleasant. Of course there are the sounds of traffic that I will hear a bit later but I don’t find that pleasant. I know some people do, but I am not one of those some people. I know that I’ll at least find something pleasant today that is a sound that is not a sound that I have just written about but I don’t know what that sound is yet and so I need to think about that… or I don’t.

What I need to let happen is the sound come to me whilst I am doing the things that I need to do. I need to not worry about the sound, or maybe I do. It’s good to pay attention as sound could mean many a thing, but you don’t necessarily want it to be the sole focus a lot of the time. Depends on what you’re doing, really, but today that is not something I’ll focus too much on as it’s not why I am doing what I’m doing today and that is something that I need to keep in mind, though I don’t and I don’t know as to why I am overthinking this.

Maybe the reason for my overthinking is due to trying to discern some sort of puzzle that I’ve made up. Maybe I’m just trying to dig deep into the idea of sound but what I’m doing is just skating across the surface without trying to go under. There’s so much underneath and all I’m doing is staying up on the top, looking at it all and thinking about how deep it is, then moving on. Still, so long as I can get across an idea of some sort of grand profoundness about sound, then I am happy, though maybe I am not. Not a fan of the fooling and the deception.

There will be a lot of sound today and it will shift and change, but it will seem continuous. It will seem like it goes on forever and maybe it will, but right now it doesn’t. Right now it doesn’t all blend into some continuing thing, but it still has layers and those layers reveal texture and tone and help paint an image of what is outside. I imagine that image would be less defined if I wasn’t familiar with what is outside my bedroom window, but with that being said there is some ability for the imagination to wander and explore and look through the sound to try and work out what is going on out there.

The great thing about sound is that it somehow speaks to us in a way that other things don’t, but you could say that for a lot of things. It’s a few words strung together that get an idea across and makes people think, but you could get a bit more descriptive about the whole thing, so long as you’re letting people still think and not leading them toward a wall. Of course examples of sound also help.

In a way the sounds that I can hear right now represent the presence of life and biota, and they represent processes. They represent action that will hopefully lead to reaction and they represent a world in motion. They are sounds that I consider pleasant and I think I want more of them in this area, even if those sounds became deafening.

They provide some sort of inspiration, but so does the sounds of the city. The sounds of a place that is busy and full of life yet seemingly devoid of it can also inspire. We can look for something warm in it and end up with nothing but loneliness, but of course the opposite is true. A lot of it depends on perspective, but I do find cities to be cold and uncaring places, and those small gestures are few and far between, and serve more as a reminder of the potential for those to do good and be kind rather than that of a concrete zone to be accommodating, but I digress.

The sounds of a city can lead to many a thing and can lead us to think about progress and inspire music and all those things, and they too can represent motion. They also can represent stories that we don’t see, and much like the sounds I’m hearing now, we only get an idea. We can make strong inferences about some things but we may not necessarily get a deep picture, though of course we can theorise about these things, and sometimes the fun is in the theorising rather than knowing the actual story.

Sometimes it’s fun to let sounds carry us away, even if they come in waves during a violent storm, crashing against the shore and splintering into temporary patterns that constantly change.

The time it took to write one thousand words: 15:12:91

Not the best writing but I’m happy with this one. I was able to be a bit looser than I usually am and so this mostly came easy. Could use some trimming, but overall I feel the writing works.

Written at home.