Childhood Memories: The Value of Moving Silently
I suppose we all have memories that we carry around with us through life, good, bad and indifferent.
Some are recent, some are quite old... perhaps going back all the way to our childhood. Sometimes there's a connection between the two, because we realize that a habit that we have in adulthood is actually the continuation of one that we learned as a child.
"Stealth Man"...
I'm basically a big old galoot, and people often wonder how it is that I can move so silently, almost like a shadow. In fact, it's sometimes an issue to the point where I supposedly scare people because they think I'm sneaking up on them. In truth, I actually had no intention of sneaking up on them; I simply move very quietly.
But why? But how?
It's one of those cases where I've gradually come to understand that one of the things I learned to do in childhood is still following me around!
I grew up in an environment where "the sound of children running through the house" was the exact opposite of my experience. There was no running, there was no sound of children, and I soon learned that if I knew what was good for me I would learn to move without making a sound.
And so, I did!
Moving silently was basically a self-preservation tool. It wasn't that I was in any danger or likely to get beaten, but moving silently meant not attracting attention, and not getting yelled at for making noise.
Thankfully, I was never a "hyper" type of kid to begin with so the whole practice of moving slowly and silently was not a stretch for me.
When you are as a child of a functional alcoholic mother and a father with a rage problem, the ability to move without making a sound is actually a very useful skill.
In time, it became so second nature to me that I never gave it a second thought. That is to say, I was never thinking about moving quietly on a conscious level, I simply did it. And that has turned out to be very surprising to most people in my adult life because evidently human beings move with a lot more noise than I do.
There's actually an interesting dichotomy there, in the sense that I don't perceive people who move with an ostensibly "normal" amount of sound as being particularly loud and I don't see myself as unusually quiet... until I am made aware that I am. But evidently both of these statements are true!
I have only half jokingly suggested to Mrs. Denmarkguy that I should be wearing bear bells around the house so I don't end up sneaking up on her and startling her. Yes, it's really that bad!
And yet, for me walking around the house stomping my feet and making a lot of noise feels completely unnatural. On reflection, though, it doesn't really feel "scary" in the sense that I have lingering PTSD from childhood; fears of being yelled at and something else negative... it just feels extraordinarily loud.
It's funny how these things can hang on with us for all these years. I guess at this point I'm probably too old to change my ways!
Thanks for stopping by and have a great week ahead!
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Created at 2023-09-18 00:50 PDT
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It’s amazing how scared people can be when you “silently creep up” on them, I’ve had this experience myself a few times in the past, however, for some reason I’ve been told on several occasions I sound like a ‘herd of elephants’ whilst going down stairs, I’ll need to master the art of floating down them if I’m ever to be a silent sloth!
I guess I just learned to sloth very quietly from the beginning... Stealth Sloth!
Hahaha
The only time I walk around and stamp my feel on the floor when I was little was only if I was angry
I was an angry bird when I was young
I probably stomped my feet when I was angry, when I was really little, but generally that sort of thing was forbidden...