As I lie here on my bed in a dark room with the hot afternoon sun competing with the blinds to get in, I take in the silence around me.

There are times I feel the world around us can just get so loud. Work and school responsibilities yell at us each morning with our alarm clocks. Bills and appointments chatter in the background. And social media…. Is deafening.

What is transpiring in the country and this world right now is not as much about the horrific events and reminders of past events that are occurring, but has everything to do with the voices we find ourselves to now have on a worldwide stage.

I choose not to share my core views and beliefs often, and usually only do so to people who have been proven trustworthy to hear without bias or prejudice. However, with every possible social media platform available, I take in a thousand voices everyday.

From political to religious to interpersonal and beyond, the views expressed sometimes concern me and sometimes make me proud. Regardless of all this, I have such a sensitive guttural reaction to those that speak one way and act another.

Hypocrisy may top the list for me on pet peeves. I cannot stomach when someone speaks of acceptance, love, and tolerance for all despite differences, yet they celebrate or show indifference to hate being placed on those that think differently.

I watched a video the other day, one of those motivational type – where the speaker described a professor who asked a question of his students. He presented the scenario of holding a hot cup of coffee and someone accidentally bumping into them and hot coffee spilling out of the cup. His question was “why did the coffee spill?” Several answers came, most being logical but essentially placing blame on either the one holding the coffee or the one who bumped into them.

The professor said no answer was correct, that the reason the hot coffee spilled is because there was hot coffee in the cup. The lesson being, whatever is in our cup will spill out to the world when it is disrupted.

Right now, what I am afraid of is that we are all consuming (filling ourselves) with tragedy, uncertainty, anger, hate, and negativity. It was evident yesterday, as a disruption to us all caused an overflow of immense emotion, opinion, and dissent.

I won’t speak of my thoughts on any of the events in the world this last week. I’ll just say, we should all make a point to find some silence, some peace. So when things get shaken again, we can hear what really matters.