The quietest sounds in a home

About a year into my listening practice, I started keeping an inventory. The idea was small: for one week, every time I noticed a sound in my flat I had not noticed before, I would write it down in the small notebook I keep for nothing in particular. By the end of the week I had filled four pages.

This will sound precious. The inventory turned out to be the most useful thing I did that year. It is the reason I now feel, in a way I did not before, that I live in my flat rather than just inside it.

The catalogue

I'll share some of the entries, partly because they are interesting and partly because reading other people's inventories tends to start your own.

• The radiator at six am, which clicks three times in slow succession as the water reaches it
• The refrigerator's compressor cycling, which I now think of as the flat's slow breath
• The narrow tap in the bathroom, which makes a small high whine before the water arrives, only when the boiler is cold
• My cat's claws on the wooden floor — different sound on different boards, depending on which way she crosses
• The window panes, which tick when the wind hits the corner of the building at a particular angle
• My own swallowing, which I had not heard for forty years until the rest of the flat got quiet enough
• The wooden floor itself, which makes a sound somewhere between a creak and a sigh in the late afternoon when it warms

Why this is useful

The inventory is useful for two reasons that took me a while to name.

The first: every sound I added to the list was a small piece of the world that had been there without me. Adding it was a small act of arrival. Living somewhere, in any deep sense, requires noticing it. The inventory was the work of moving in, even though I had been technically living here for a year.

The second: the inventory trained an attention that has leaked into other places. I now notice the small sounds of other people's breathing during conversations. I notice the sound my coffee maker makes when it is almost done. I notice when a cafe I have been in many times has changed its background music. None of this is useful. Some of it is the texture of being alive.

The world makes more sounds than we have any right to be missing.

The exercise, if you'd like to try it

For one week, keep a small notebook for sounds. Anywhere it will be at hand. Every time you hear something in your home that you can't remember hearing before, write it down. One line. The note has done its job by the time you have written it.

By day four you will be embarrassed by how much you have been missing. By day seven you will have a small inventory you didn't know you wanted, and a small new attention that you also didn't know you wanted, and the inventory and the attention will, between them, do something quietly to your relationship with your own rooms.

Next month: a piece on what I now call "humming bath" — a small somatic practice that begins as sound and ends in the jaw.