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- #036 On Noise: Why You Keep Going Back
There is a relief that arrives the moment you step into Karura Forest; quiet and immediate, before you have done anything to earn it. The path curves away from the city and at some point, without noticing exactly when, the city is simply gone. This Wednesday morning I followed that path without intention. No podcast, no music, no agenda, no destination. Just the sound of birds I couldn't name and light breaking through the canopy in thin, unhurried lines. At several points I took a beat and simply paused, listening to nothing in particular and everything at once.
And in that stillness, a thought arrived uninvited.
I had come here, like most people do, because something in me needed this. The quiet. The green. The absence of the ordinary. But standing there in the middle of it, I found myself watching myself enjoy it, already narrating the experience, already thinking about how I would describe the feeling later. And then the thought sharpened into something uncomfortable:
Why do I need to come here to feel like this?
Not as a question about city life or busy schedules. As a more honest question. One I wasn't sure I wanted to follow.
We say we go to nature to reconnect. To ground ourselves. As though nature were a place we came from and simply forgot. We speak about it the way you speak about visiting someone you love but rarely see, with a mixture of longing and guilt. An hour in the forest. A weekend by the ocean. A walk at dusk when the pressure becomes too much. Then back to the life we built, which somehow always seems to be the thing we need relief from.
But watch yourself the next time you walk among trees. Closely, without judgment. Ask what is actually happening.
You are not relaxing. You are relieved. And relief is not the same thing as peace. Relief is what happens when something that was pressing against you temporarily stops.
The tree does not possess peace the way we imagine it does. It possesses nothing in that sense. It has no narrator running commentary on its own existence. No voice cataloguing what it should have done differently last season. No quiet calculation of what the other trees think of it. The tree is not peaceful. It simply lacks the apparatus that destroys peace.
Which means you are not drawing from its stillness.
You are envying an absence.
There is a particular kind of consciousness that does not merely live, it watches itself living. And in that watching, a distance opens up. Between the moment and the experience of the moment. Between the feeling and the thought about the feeling. It is so constant, so familiar, that most people never notice it is there. They only notice what it costs.
You have felt its opposite. A moment of complete absorption, when the doing and the doer became one thing, when the gap closed and you were simply present without commentary. You probably remember it as your best day, or a moment that felt more real than most. Athletes have a name for it. Mystics built entire traditions around it. Most people stumble into it accidentally and then spend years trying to find it again without knowing what they're looking for.
Walking in Karura that morning, I wondered if what we call the peace of nature is simply this: the temporary suspension of the watcher. The forest doesn't give you stillness. It gives you conditions in which the narrator goes quiet long enough for you to notice what was underneath it.
And then you walk back out.
To the noise. To the screen. To the schedule. To the conversation you left unfinished. The narrator resumes, almost immediately, almost without effort. Within minutes the forest feels like a memory and the ordinary life reasserts itself with all its familiar weight.
We treat this as inevitable and build rituals around it, the morning walk, the weekend escape, the annual retreat, as though the goal were to manage the condition rather than understand it. As though peace were a place you visit rather than something whose absence you have simply stopped questioning.
I am not offering an answer here. I am not sure I have one.
But I left Karura that morning carrying a question I hadn't arrived with. Not about how to find more stillness. Something quieter than that. Something about the noise itself; where it comes from, why it persists, and whether we return to it by necessity or by a habit so old we've mistaken it for nature.
The forest will be there next week. So will the question.
What you do with the silence between them is the only thing worth examining.
Speak soon,
Rey Mungai
Wisdom • Courage • Justice • Temperance • Endurance • Clarity • Faith
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