“I just wish I had some peace and quiet!” Many of us use this phrase with exasperation when we feel overwhelmed by what is going on around us. The constant communication we receive from the many different parts of our lives – children, phones, e-mails, colleagues – can often seem like incessant interruptions of our thoughts. It’s no different out here in Afghanistan, there is noise everywhere.
The activities of my day usually bombard me with constant noise. I wake up to the sound of HVAC units running in my room. I walk to the showers and the chow hall past noisy diesel generations. Our FOB is constantly receiving aircraft landing just a few hundred yards from where we live and work. When I am out on a mission, the noise of the massive engines on our MRAPs is at times deafening. Even walking back at night under the stars, I continue to hear the trucks, the generators, the helicopters. It seems everywhere I go, I wish for peace and quiet.
Back home, I would tell Carrie Lou that I wished for peace and quiet when the girls were rowdy, or when I was just trying to concentrate on something. I would wish for peace and quiet when I would be interrupted in my office in Cambridge on really busy days. I would wish for peace and quiet when some yahoo on Memorial Drive is impatient and won’t let off his horn because he can’t speed home.
I thought about all of this on my walk past the generators and the MRAPs heading out on mission last night and I realized that what I really wanted was the peace and quiet of home.
I started to realize what peace and quiet really meant to me, and it wasn’t devoid of sound. It meant listening to soft snoring of my girls after they fell asleep at night. It meant the crackle of a warm fire with a good book. It meant the soft breeze through the trees on a warm summer day.
I don’t really want peace and quiet. I want the peace of being around my family, and the quiet that accompanies just being around each other.
