IT WAS AROUND 7 AM
when I sat down at my desk, the house still cloaked in morning quiet,
the computer before me in hibernation. Eyes closed, I paused.
I began to notice things . . .
The unhurried tick of the wall clock. The
baseboard heater’s quiet percussion—an irregular tapping that sometimes
bordered on jazz. My constant companion: tinnitus. A steady, soft white
noise more noticeable in my left ear—the ear next to the crash cymbal of
my teenage band days.
Then, a distant semi-truck shifting gears. My
breathing. A brief itch on my forearm. Tongue resting. A sudden twitch
of my index finger.
None of these things were remarkable on their own.
But collectively, the awareness formed a kind of internal landscape—a
symphony of stillness, composed entirely of inputs my brain was
receiving and arranging. The volume was low, but the information was
dense.
Even with my eyes closed, perception continued.
Not darkness exactly, but a shifting, grainy canvas—a murky field of
purples, grays and an occasional swirl of white. Not “sight,” exactly,
but visual data nonetheless. A fog lit by random neurological sparks.
A thought struck me: In this “quiet”, there’s so much going on!
Here in this quiet—before breakfast, before
emails, video editing, cat chores, a supply run to Waterloo—my brain was
already orchestrating a thousand sensations. Quiet, yes. But hardly
inactive. This "stillness" was nothing short of a sensory flood.
And think about it: we don’t escape this onslaught
of input even when we hit the sack. For even in sleep, our minds rarely
go silent. We catapult into a surreal carnival of dreams, where
sensation and movement are conjured up from within. The brain continues
to process—sometimes even manipulating a phantom body through impossible
landscapes. We dream of running, of flying, of arguing with long-gone
relatives or fixing appliances that never existed. Our minds move
us—even when we’re frozen in sleep.
So if awareness persists in the waking quiet and
continues in the veiled theater of dreams, where is the off switch?
Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe the brain—simply doesn’t pause; it just
shifts modes.
Layers unfold in silence, unnoticed.
You’re there, somewhere between stillness and showtime.
Waking up . . .
Nothing happening . . . except everything. | 
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