Don't blame the refrigerator.

Reading time ~ 2 minutes

When we spent the first night at a new place-being it in a hotel for a vacation, a new apartment or, in my case a routine change of place due to the lifestyle of a digital nomad-we hear everything.

We hear the cars driving by on the street, the wind rushing through the trees in front of the window, the upstairs neighbor walking around, the refrigerator humming as it cools down.

We hear everything in this first night.

But then, in the second night, we only hear some of it. And with every night we spent there we hear less. And that’s a good thing. Otherwise, we would lose a lot of sleep with all the noise around us.

But these annoying sounds aren’t the only thing we unconsciously ignore every day and night. With time going by we get used to almost everything that surrounds us. Not only the bad things we can’t change. Also the things we could and should change. We just get used to it and live with it.

And weeks, months or even years go by without us realizing that it is still there. The sound, the humming, the steps. And everything else too.

And then, one night we lie in our bed, and suddenly there they are. And we wonder if they’ve been there all along or if they just started.

The good thing with the annoying sound is that we won’t hear them the following night. The bad thing with everything else is that we won’t realize them the following night.

So instead of ignoring everything, we should choose to recognize everything every now and then. We should consciously look for the annoying sounds our life generates. Take inventory of everything that bothers us, that annoys us, that keeps us awake at night, that we usually ignore.

In recognizing these obstacles, we can find ways to deal with them so they can’t sneak up on us when we lie in bed and can’t sleep. So it’s only the cars, the neighbors, and the refrigerators that bother us at night and not the problems we’ve been carrying around for far too long.