LIFE is noisy. And I don’t mean the traffic jams or construction drills outside your office window. It is the constant ping of notifications.
The flood of messages, emails, deadlines and expectations. Everyone – and everything – seems to want a piece of your attention.
We rarely realise it but attention is a precious currency – once spent, it is hard to get back. Yet, we give it away so freely.
That is why I believe this: in a world full of noise, protecting your quiet is one of the most powerful things you can do.
I am not just talking about silence in the literal sense, though that is a good place to start. I am talking about those little pockets of time where your mind can simply breathe.
A morning walk before the world wakes up. A cup of tea in the late afternoon, steam curling softly into the air. The solitude of a hot shower after a long day. Moments where you are not doing anything for anyone but simply being. It is in those moments, more often than not, that your best thoughts arrive.
I have lost count of how many times an idea for an article, a teaching strategy or a long-delayed solution to a lingering problem popped up, not during a meeting or staring at a screen, but while tying my shoelaces before a slow run or while absentmindedly folding the laundry or during a quiet drive between the city and home.
That is not wasted time; it is integrating time, where all the loose ends of our thoughts find ways to knot themselves into something useful, or at least, meaningful.
Rumi wrote: “There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.” But how can we possibly hear when our ears, eyes and minds are constantly being pulled in a dozen directions?
We can’t, not unless we make space for it. The irony is that we tend to undervalue these gentle moments. We label them as idle or unproductive. We try to fill every pause with something – a scroll through social media, a podcast or a reply to a WhatsApp message. But not every blank space needs to be filled; some of them are sacred.
It reminds me of a lesson I learned (or rather, relearned) during the height of the pandemic. It was a strange period of time – heavy, uncertain and unusually quiet in all the right ways.
With no meetings to rush to and no travel on the calendar, I found myself rediscovering the small joys: walking around my neighbourhood without a destination, sipping kopi while watching the rain or just sitting still, doing nothing and feeling okay with that.
Somewhere in that stillness, clarity returned. Not suddenly, not dramatically, but slowly. Thought by thought, breath by breath and I realised how often I had traded away my quiet for noise disguised as urgency.
Even now, the temptation is always there – to squeeze more into the day, reply faster and be perpetually available. But I have learned to put boundaries around those moments that keep me anchored.
A walk is a walk, a bath is a bath and a cup of tea is sacred. No phones, no multitasking and no performance, just me being human.
So here is a gentle challenge: find your quiet, guard it like it is something valuable because it is. Whether it is 10 minutes in the morning or an hour on weekends, protect that time and make it yours, make it non-negotiable.
You don’t need to meditate or write a poem or come out of it with anything profound, just let your mind wander, let your shoulders drop and let yourself be.
If someone asks why you are “doing nothing”, smile and say, “I’m protecting my quiet”. Because in that space, your sanity lives, your clarity returns and your soul exhales.
And honestly? The world can wait.
Dr Nahrizul Adib Kadri is a professor of biomedical engineering at the Faculty of Engineering and the principal of Ibnu Sina Residential College, Universiti Malaya. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
