Hello, Good Evening and Welcome

What part of your day are you in, and what noises are drawing attention to themselves?

"The evening is a time for reflection, a moment to pause and take stock of one's day." - Oscar Wilde

Hello, good evening and welcome to my first ever blog post. My name is David, and I am now in the evening of what has been a challenging, but extremely rewarding day. It’s been busy, noisy, happy, sad, sometimes emotional, often hard and frustrating, but with many hours of love and laughter. Yes, on reflection, a day well spent.

When I say day, I mean it as a metaphor for life. Metaphors are a way of creating a comparison that while not literally true, provides a figurative meaning. They can help you see a situation from a different viewpoint, perhaps provide the catalyst to do things differently, or even reveal a door that allows people to enter your world.

So, what if your estimated life span could be compressed and measured like a single 24-hour day?What would that look like? Well, whilst there are various statistics available, for someone like me, who was born in NW England in the mid-1960s, life expectancy would be approximately 78-years. This means each hour that ticks by would represent 3-years and 3-months (78 ÷ 24 = 3.25).

Please Note: Life expectancy changes and is different depending on your gender (women tend to live longer), where you were born (e.g. availability of food, water, education, medical care) and when you were born (e.g. pandemics, science, technology).

As each hour of a persons estimated day maybe represented by slightly more or less years/months, the example above will not be accurate for everyone, but what it can do is help determine, as a metaphor, what is the morning, afternoon or evening of your day. What part of your day are you in, and are there any noises providing a soundtrack to what you are doing?

• Are you still in the early hours of the morning waiting for the sun to rise, discovering the cacophony of sounds around you and trying to figure out who you are and what you like…or are you listening to inspiring and encouraging voices, and attacking your day with hope and enthusiasm?

• Is the morning sun shining softly, bringing with it the loud din of work, mobile phones ringing, traffic blaring, emails pinging and the beeps of new technology you just don’t understand?

• Do you find yourself approaching mid-day and prioritising the clatter of climbing your career ladder with the clamour of raising a family, or just embracing the possibilities of the cocktail hour, as “the afternoon knows what the morning never suspected” - Robert Frost.

• Alternatively, you could be dealing with the tone and volume of the afternoon dance, or listening to your own internal chatter and thinking that you might have been following the wrong notes for a few hours, as you are not hearing the applause you wanted. Remember, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts” - Winston Churchill.

• Finally, you may be in the evening of your day and still be enjoying the din of work, or perhaps you’ve retired and are now helping your children and/or grandchildren make sense of the sounds in their morning. Conversely, you might be a late bloomer and are just getting started on making the noises you always wanted to, but just never found the minutes or hours earlier in the day. “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream” - C.S. Lewis.

Please Note: Your morning and afternoon may be the noisiest, but you could carry on making a commotion and have wonderful conversations, laughter and music throughout your whole evening. You may even go past midnight, and hold a raucous after party for quite a few hours of the next morning.

There are thousands of noises that we process, with different sounds perhaps more pertinent to whichever part of our day we are in. Our perception of whether a noise is good or bad is fairly subjective, and can be influenced by a number of different factors. Pleasurable sounds tend to consist of harmonious frequencies that can lift the atmosphere, make you smile and laugh, and even create a sense of order. Harsh and disagreeable sounds often contain dissonant frequencies that can clash, create tension and provoke stress responses.

As I am now in the early part of my evening, just after 6pm, I’m going to take Oscar Wilde’s advice and use the minutes from the remains of my day, to reflect and take stock. Due to my MND, I know that I may have to go to bed early, but I plan to use every trick in the book (there’s a monster in the wardrobe, I need a glass of milk, read me a story etc.) to stay up as long as possible.

“The evening’s the best part of the day. You’ve done your day’s work.

Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it.”

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day