How I Found Stillness in Noise

How I Found Stillness in Noise

By Hasnain Shah

I used to think silence was the only way to find peace. I craved it. I imagined it as a cabin in the woods with birdsong as my alarm clock and the rustle of leaves as my lullaby. Yet life had other plans for me. Instead of a forest retreat, I found myself planted in the middle of a city that never seemed to pause.

My apartment sat above a busy intersection, where horns honked like punctuation marks and sirens screeched at random intervals. Street vendors shouted deals below my window. On weekends, the upstairs neighbor hosted karaoke nights that turned into early-morning marathons. For years, I believed I was just “surviving” the noise, waiting for a chance to escape to someplace quieter. What I didn’t realize then was that peace wasn’t going to be handed to me by silence. I would have to build it within myself.

The turning point came one evening, not from a place of inspiration but from sheer exhaustion. I had been working late, eyes bleary from screens, when I stepped out onto my small balcony for a breath of air. The city roared around me: buses groaning, people arguing across the street, music spilling out of a bar. I remember gripping the railing and muttering, “I can’t take this anymore.”

But then something unexpected happened. In the chaos, my attention caught on a single sound — the rhythmic click of a cyclist’s chain as they pedaled by. It was small, nearly swallowed by the larger commotion, yet it felt steady, grounding. For those few seconds, I wasn’t drowning in the noise. I was listening.

That moment sparked a quiet experiment: what if the city wasn’t my enemy but my teacher? Instead of shutting it out, could I find a way to live with it?

I started small. Each morning on my walk to the subway, I chose one sound to focus on. Sometimes it was the chatter of schoolchildren, sometimes the hiss of steam escaping from a food cart. The trick wasn’t to judge the sound as pleasant or annoying, but simply to notice it. To anchor myself to it. In those moments, the city became less of a blur and more of a symphony. Messy, yes, but still a kind of music.

Later, I carried this practice into my apartment. At night, when my neighbor’s karaoke rolled into its fourth hour, I stopped clenching my jaw and tried something different. I sat with the sound. I noticed how her voice wavered, how the bassline vibrated faintly through the floorboards. It wasn’t silence, but strangely, my resistance dissolved. I could even laugh at the off-key notes.

Meditation teachers often talk about focusing on the breath, but I learned to focus on the city itself. The clatter of the subway became my mantra. The murmur of voices outside my window lulled me to sleep like a distant lullaby. Even sirens transformed: not as interruptions, but as reminders that life was moving, urgent and alive, just as I was.

Over time, I realized that stillness wasn’t the absence of noise. Stillness was the space I created inside myself, a pause between reaction and response. Once I discovered that, the city stopped feeling hostile. It became a place where I could practice peace daily, no matter what was happening outside.

Ironically, when I finally took a weekend trip to a quiet countryside, I missed the hum of the streets. The silence felt empty, almost too heavy. I found myself listening for the sound of traffic, the laughter of strangers, the heartbeat of the city that had once overwhelmed me.

Now, when people ask me how I live in a place so loud, I smile. I tell them that the noise hasn’t gone away — but it no longer owns me. Inside the chaos, I discovered a deeper kind of silence, one that no sound can touch.

Because stillness, I learned, isn’t found. It’s made.