My tinnitus was driving me crazy, so I headed to the beach. But instead of a paradise of white noise, I encountered a celestial silence that was deafening…
I stood at the threshold of the divine and immediately wanted to go home.
For most people, what I experienced would represent a moment of serenity, a rare and blissful communion with nature. But I found nirvana at the beach, and all I wanted to do was get back in the car and drown out the silence.
It was the middle of May and I’d taken my family to stay with my parents in Norfolk. I’d been living with tinnitus for about a month at that stage.
The ringing noise inside my head had become apparent late one night and hadn’t stopped since. Getting to sleep was proving enormously challenging. I was nowhere near reconciled to the ‘new normal’ of living with an unending noise accompanying my every waking moment.
The change of scenery at my parent’s house was pleasant but it also robbed me of my routine, and things quickly deteriorated.
I was in a constant state of private agitation, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I dreaded the moment when the tinnitus would encroach on my world: on a conversation with my parents or a play session with my four-year-old daughter.
Drowning out the noise
Sometimes I would talk just to fill any silence, dreading even small gaps in conversation. I found myself jabbering nonsensically like a DJ filling dead air while trying to cue up the next record.
I’d do anything to distract myself from the endless ringing in my ears
I’d turn the radio on whenever I entered a room. I walked around the house with my iPhone playing music from my pocket.
If I ever found myself alone without these aural life preservers, I’d start singing joylessly under my breath as I paced the room. Anything to distract myself from the ringing in my ears.
So the suggestion of a late afternoon trip to the beach presented a welcome respite. Surely, the seaside was one place you could consider a reliable haven of white noise. The crash of the waves, the gurgle of the water draining over sand and shells, seagulls cawing, dogs barking and padding over the shoreline, the buffeting brown noise of the coastal winds…
This could be a blissful, natural tonic for me, and the perfect capstone to the day for my daughter.
But as we made our way down to the sands later that afternoon, I felt my stomach start to sink.
Lost horizon
We were alone on the near-silent pebbly shore. There was no breath of wind, no crash of waves, no nagging gulls, just the contemplative hush of a gallery.
Even stranger than the silence was the celestial vision presented by the beach itself.
As we faced out to sea, all sense of space and distance became indistinct. A static ceiling of cotton-wool clouds extended from the shoreline to the far distance, where it met the still, white surface of water.
The thinnest graze of blue sky could be perceived in the far distance, like the delicate embellishment of a watercolour brush. Yet whenever you squinted at the horizon, it seemed to disappear; sea and sky became one again.
Gentle ripples silently rolled up out of infinity
It was an hour from low tide. Gentle ripples silently rolled up out of infinity, caressing the hazel sands before us in an unbroken procession.
The water looked an inch deep, and it seemed to stay that way, all the way to the skyline.
In the absence of competing noises, the sound of gentle bubbling of footfalls in the shallows was amplified. It was disorienting.
Heaven can wait
This, I thought, is the part in the movie where the protagonist realises they’ve died and finds themselves standing at the gates of heaven. The unreal tranquility. The illusory horizon that could be miles distant, or some 100 metres away. The angelic white light in the distance.
Here our hero stands: alone and ankle deep in slack waters extending into eternity. Then he wades forward into the light, to begin his afterlife.
I felt neither enlightened nor transcendent. My ears were ringing in the silence, and I wanted to escape, to get back to the car radio and the comparative comfort of my parents’ house.
But my young daughter loved everything about the seaside with a joyous and consuming intensity. She was already wading out into those millpond shallows, wearing wellington boots and an elated grin.
I realised that, for the next hour at least, heaven must become purgatory instead.
