Savouring silence

A portrait of KL City for the past few days made me take pleasure in the beauty of silence. No maddening crowd. No honking of cars. A quick glance through KL city makes me wonder, where is everyone? Void and quiet. Something I crave for in KL for sometime. The silence is sublime if you know how to be grateful for a quiet mind.
This Eidul Fitr celebration sent everyone back to their hometown for their family gathering. A drive around KL city makes me understand where the surplus of folks comes from. Not here definitely. They are from smaller towns, outskirts of KL and other states (either North or South)!! This calls for the next question, why are they here? Simply because there are wide career opportunities lies in big cities like KL, Penang and Singapore. If only government can create job opportunities, establish industrialization or relocate several businesses to other states besides major cities, it will enable development in small suburbs as well as disperse congestion in saturated cities.

The 3 days Raya break made me cherish the quiet life of KL so much so I began to fret for the coming days when all the folks will make their way back to KL and life will be back to usual (full of traffic jams, noise and pollutions). This morning when I was driving to work, the roads were quite empty which made me tempted to take a slow drive to work. No rush hour issues, no rude motorist to cut into my lane abruptly and no unwarranted mood swings. A beautiful Friday morning which I savored the entire journey while listening to music on my radio. How I wish this was the scenario all throughout the year? It’s impossible unless some major festivals like Chinese New Year or Hari Raya drives out the whole city dwellers back to their hometown.



What I found a little unexpected, though, were the non-Muslims who also grasped this golden opportunity to take a whole week off to head back hometown. Even my office was quite empty today with turnover rate being low. Silence was accompanied by a light breeze of rainfall. Perhaps not surprisingly, I was sitting in my own cubicle with about 4 of my colleagues silently hitting the keypads of our laptops, indicating work in silence.



Silence pushes the mind as far as it would go, is undeniably true in my case today since I sank into my office chair at 7.30am, I’m working on my project report and monthly taskforce report. Hot coffee being the elixir for me to stay put here.
Natural silence is something we all look for in some point of time due to the escalating encroachment of city noise. There is simply too much noise, from the gadgets we rely on to define ourselves to the people we have to deal with daily. In public, at work and in our homes, the commotion is deafening, with seemingly very little of anything meaningful being said. So I seize the moment today and began to hear and bask in the beauty of nature such as birds chirping, rain droplets on the windowpane, and light breeze gushing through the tall acacia tree branches. It’s beautiful!


I had been an adoring admirer of Mother Nature. It can be the gushing sound of wave glistening under the moonlight or first rays peeping from the clouds after rain. Yes, I have experienced all these little moments with silence accompanying me. Silence is special simply because I can sit down and admire the panorama of Mother Nature in total silence and yet feel so contented. You don’t get to have a quiet moment all the time but its worth.