Yesterday if somebody asked me to classify noise, typically I would try to classify it based on different criteria: one being the source (e.g. human, machinery, nature - birds, water, etc.); another being quantitative attributes I can recall from my limited knowledge of physics (e.g. amplitude, frequency, etc.). But not anymore!
Today I learned there's only two kinds of noises: inside noise and outside noise. Outside noise is the noise that surrounds you; it originates from the world external to you. Inside noise is the one that comes from within you (well, not literally!). I would, any day, prefer outside noise to inside noise. Because, I know how to shut myself off from the outside noise, but I am still struggling to shut myself off from inside noise.
My mind has somewhat a multi-threaded architecture (pardon the software jargon). And it seems to have Professor Dumbledore's pensieve (hope the non-followers of Harry Potter won't mind this reference), where all my memories and thoughts seem to be stored away as threads. At any point of time, I might have more than one of these threads running continuously, hogging my brain (the CPU). There might, often, be context-switching based on thread-prioritization. Say, when I'm at work, I might be thinking about code, but the minute I'd step out alone for lunch, it'd switch to another thread (that might have been high-priority the night before).
At times I wish there were a room where I'd be able to shut the inside noise off as well by a mere jolt to the door. However, now that I've come to think of it, it might encourage me to confine myself to that room for longer and yet longer periods at a stretch. So, I guess I need to continue the hunt for the key to tranquility inside of me, so one day the whole world would be my room, and I could find my peace even in a deafeningly noisy lab.
