We were outside in the late afternoon light.
“Do you hear that whooshing sound?” I asked.
Her little face paused and her gaze went distant. After a moment, she said, “Yes, what is that?”
“That’s the ocean,” I told her. “It’s a whole mile away, but we can still hear the waves from here.”
Her expression instantly lifted. It felt like a small moment of magic—knowing that her friend, the ocean, was with her even from a distance.
I wondered how many of our neighbors had ever noticed that far off crashing of the waves against the beach. How many had consciously heard it—and how many had unknowingly tuned it out as part of the hum of the city?
It is hard to notice something distant and constant like that when your attention is pulled toward brighter, louder things—phones, music, screens. Noise layered on top of noise.
And there was a time when I don’t think I heard it either.
I was a late bloomer to social media, but once I adopted it, I went all in—scrolling, creating, fully participating. I’ve been off Instagram for a couple of years now, and I can see how numb I had become—
to the rustle of the wind,
to the light in the trees,
to the simple miracle of breathing fresh air.
The natural world—and even the human one—is full of subtlety.
Small details, almost hidden, like little Easter eggs scattered throughout the day. They have the power to ground you, to bring a sense of peace or even wonder—if you notice them.
But noticing takes practice. It takes presence. And it’s a skill we don’t often use anymore.
Our attention has become fragmented—pulled in a hundred directions at once. Any silence is considered a problem to solve, and we seek to replace every slow moment with something faster.
This matters more than we think.
What we notice becomes the texture of our lives. We can choose to notice the smaller, everyday moments of magic, like a child full of wonder, noticing the ocean’s distant roar. Or we can choose to only consume things that don’t ask us to slow down, that just arrive at the speed of light. That we sometimes didn’t even want to notice anyway.
When our attention is scattered, our days feel scattered. When it is steady, even ordinary moments begin to feel full and grounded.
It’s not that we’ve lost the skill. We’ve just lost the habit. But we can rebuild it.
It can start with something small—
taking a walk without headphones,
eating a meal outside,
letting your mind settle long enough to notice what’s already there.
It can look like listening fully when someone speaks, or allowing yourself to wait—standing in line, sitting in a waiting room—without reaching for a screen.
Even a few moments of stillness, however uncomfortable, can begin to bring your attention back.
The ocean is humming, whether we hear it or not.
So much of life is like that—steady, present, waiting to be noticed.
Maybe the fullness of life isn’t about adding anything new.
Maybe it’s about returning to what has been there all along.
Like a sound in the distance.
A moment of stillness.
Pausing long enough to hear something we’ve forgotten how to notice.