How To Find Quiet In A Shouty World

​​​​Modern life is noisy, frenetic and mentally exhausting, which is why “quietude” is so very golden, says Nikki Gemmell.

- Nikki Gemmell

A year ago, I was drowning. I turn towards quiet like a plant towards the light, yet stillness and silence – a recalibrating stopping – were beyond me. I just couldn’t glean them anywhere amid the cram of mothering four kids and being a wife and full-time work; an agitation of the soul was swamping me. Quietude involves a fervent wish for simplicity, and I couldn’t simplify my life.

The word noise is derived from the Latin word nausea, meaning seasickness. I was drowning in noise. It felt like a time for risky living; to somehow carve out tranquillity or I’d go under. My family was suffering around me. I was shouty mum, snappy and stroppy, becoming someone I didn’t recognise and didn’t like.

Quietude felt like a necessary medicine – but first I had to recognise where to find it. It was the first leakings of dawn in the night sky. The golden hour at sunset when the world was exhaling and the light was honeyed up. It was flicking an off switch on the great noise of life. The hand held out to someone, unasked. An eyelid kissed. A spiritual surrender. It was a house awaiting the return of the children, breath held. It was the roar of a seashell to an ear and the hum of silence in the desert. It was a necessary, listening pause, the observer and the listener. It was a gift.

Most of us exist amid cram, women especially. Of work in the home and the wider world, of family pressures and myriad social snares, of life. A search for quietude involves a surfacing into light, and lightness. I learnt to find it in the simple things around me. A kitchen anointed by sunlight. A candle’s honeyed glow. The Sanctus in Fauré’s