Can you hear the voice?
I don’t mean the loud one. Not the one that lists everything still unfinished, or the one that rehearses tomorrow before today has even settled.
I mean the quieter one. The one that arrives as a nudge. A soft yes. A soft no. A sense that something is true before you’ve found the words for it.
Lately I’ve been noticing how hard that voice has to work to reach me.
Life gets loud. Notifications. Conversations that stay in the body long after they’ve ended. The hum of needing to keep up.
Overwhelm doesn’t always arrive as a crash. Sometimes it just turns up the volume until the quieter knowing gets hard to find.
I have known seasons where I stopped listening almost entirely. Not because I didn’t trust that voice, but because I couldn’t hear it over everything else I was carrying.
The voice doesn’t shout. It doesn’t compete. It waits.
So I’ve been asking myself a different question. Not How do I get quieter forever? But What would help me hear again, even for a moment?
Sometimes it’s stepping outside and letting my eyes rest on something that isn’t asking anything of me: sky, water, a tree doing nothing but being a tree.
Sometimes it’s putting the phone in another room for ten minutes and noticing how much of the noise was never mine to begin with.
Sometimes it’s naming what’s loud. The unfinished list. The worry I borrowed. The story that everything has to be figured out before I can rest.
The voice doesn’t need a perfect silence. It needs a little space. A breath. A doorway thin enough for something soft to come through.
And when it returns, I feel a kind of homecoming. A reminder that I already know more than the noise wants me to believe.
If life has been loud for you lately, your own knowing isn’t gone. It’s underneath, waiting for a little room.
Sit somewhere you feel safe. Let your shoulders drop. Ask gently:
What have I been tuning out?
Stay with that for a breath or two. Then ask:
What is my quieter knowing trying to tell me right now?
You may only get a feeling, a word, a direction. That’s enough. Let it be small. Let it be true.
With love,
Paige
For a little more space to pause and listen, you’re welcome to A Ritual for Setting It Down, my free guide.
