Turning down the noise

A financial advisor once told me that his job – if I hired him – would be to “turn down the noise” that’s so much as part of the investment world.

I said, “What?”

I live on three acres just off Highway 666. It was probably the Highway Department’s financial advisor that devalued the same highway by changing its designation to 491, but the noise is still the same.

Semi trucks, pickups, SUVs, automobiles, big motorcycles, the noise of living beside a highway – any highway, really. The noise is so much a part of the background that I usually don’t notice it.
I still think I live on three acres of rural America where the birds and the bees create most of the music.

And then I get away from the acreage, like this week. Two days along the Crystal River, the noise of ice cold water gushing over rocks. Rush hour water. Starlight crashing down from the sky’s black tarmac. That kind of traffic. Every truck going by on the pavement that pretends it’s an asphalt river, snaking all the way over McClure Pass and down to Glenwood Springs, I finally hear it.

The silence, that is.

The rare moment in my life when there’s nothing to ignore.