A Beautiful Raid

(A Morning Reflection)

Sometimes it’s hard to tell how much we rely on the noise of the world to make our own voices—and our choices—feel heard.

These days, everything feels so loud. Newsfeeds, conversations, sirens, headlines—all of it competing for space in our heads. We are flooded with urgency, with the demand to react, to respond, to perform our attention.

This morning, the train stopped mid-ride and turned off its engines before reaching the next station. The chatter around me fell into a whisper, then into something quieter than quiet. Even my coworker’s fingers seemed to moonwalk on her keyboard. We were adrift on an island of tracks, suspended between motion and stillness.

For a brief moment, silence took over. Not the silence of the ocean, where I usually go to listen, but the kind that finds you in the least poetic of places—crowded, fluorescent, and unplanned.

And yet, it was there that I felt something rummage through the halls of my thoughts. The world, with all its noise and need for declaration,…