It’s endured for more than 200 years, but Ben­jamin Franklin’s adage “Noth­ing is cer­tain except death and tax­es” must now be amend­ed. Today, the cer­tain­ty includes brain-mug­ging loud music, and  adverts for anti-aging supplements,

While tax­es are an indis­putable neces­si­ty, nei­ther of the two addi­tions to Franklin’s tru­ism are in any way essential.
In fact, accord­ing to the World Health Organ­i­sa­tion: “Loud sounds are a major envi­ron­men­tal source of health prob­lems. In some places, it ranks sec­ond only to air pollution.”
The effi­ca­cy of sup­ple­ments falls any­where from nil through mar­gin­al to at best, less than what the adverts claim.
Con­fir­ma­tion of both those asser­tions rests with María Branyas Mor­era, who died this week, aged 117 years and 168 days, still lucid and with only minor health problems.
The eighth old­est liv­ing human in his­to­ry cred­it­ed her longevi­ty to:  luck, good genet­ics, tran­quil­i­ty, good con­nec­tion with fam­i­ly and friends, con­tact with nature, emo­tion­al sta­bil­i­ty, no wor­ries, no regrets, lots of pos­i­tiv­i­ty, and stay­ing away from tox­ic people.
No men­tion was made of noise or supplements,
I won­der what she’d have made of the lat­est one scat­tered through­out online ver­sions of the news­pa­pers I read.
It is, the ornate type face pro­claims “…the world’s first, and only sci­ence-backed, patent­ed, award-win­ning C15:0 sup­ple­ment that sup­ports your long-term health & wellness.”
In addi­tion to sev­er­al well-spaced pages of per­cent­ages of mul­ti­ple ben­e­fits, the newest longevi­ty won­der prod­uct alleged­ly “…pro­tects your cells from aging-relat­ed oxida­tive damage.”
I guess the late super-cen­te­nar­i­an lady who liked cof­fee and yoghurt didn’t know she was in effect rust­ing from the inside out.

          ASSAULT FROM THE OUTSIDE IN

Hope­ful­ly in her lat­ter years she wa spared the bat­ter­ing of music – or some­one else’s idea of it – blared with­out respite in almost any open space where peo­ple gath­er, includ­ing retail stores and super­mar­kets, whether cus­tomers like it or not.
It has dri­ven me to for­get to buy gro­ceries even when they’re on a writ­ten list.
When I com­plained to the man­ag­er of an elec­tron­ics store about the vol­ume and choice of the in-house music, he said: “My staff like it.”
He seemed non-plussed when I replied: “I hope for your sake your staff spend a lot of mon­ey here, because I ful­ly intend­ed to, but I can’t make ratio­nal shop­ping deci­sions in this din,” and walked out.
No doubt that doesn’t make me unique.
Type “silence” in a search bar and scores of quotes laud­ing the ben­e­fits of peace and qui­et will pop up.
None define it as detrimental.
Maybe that’s at the root of some, if not many, of our soci­etal ills.
There are too many peo­ple who would rather fill their heads with noise than actu­al and per­haps stim­u­lat­ing thoughts, or have so lit­tle to think about they have to make up for the deficit with exces­sive decibels.
Lis­ten­ing to loud music is essen­tial­ly self-med­icat­ing. Not some­thing one ought to be doing in pub­lic. That includes dri­ving around blar­ing your (but not nec­es­sar­i­ly everyone’s) favourite music, with a bass line so loud it makes the vehi­cle and oth­ers around it vibrate, for instance.
Equal­ly annoy­ing are jet ski rid­ers who, for com­plete­ly inex­plic­a­ble (to me any­way) rea­sons, have music on their “per­son­al water­craft”.
Please note: it’s “per­son­al” only in the sense that you’re dri­ving it and chose the music. Sound car­ries across water so far and so well that any­one with­in half a kilo­me­ter and more might as well be on it with you.
Nev­er hav­ing owned or even rid­den one, I can nei­ther attest to nor fair­ly den­i­grate the health and psy­cho­log­i­cal ben­e­fits or oth­er­wise of  the ubiq­ui­tous toys, with or with­out music.
What I do know, is choos­ing noise over qui­etude will nev­er pro­vide rare priv­i­leges like a moment of near tran­scen­dent tran­quil­i­ty and sense of won­der I was recent­ly afforded.
Just before sun­set, I was doing a leisure­ly if awk­ward breast stroke along the shore­line in front of our cottage.
There was no one else in sight, or sound.
With­out warn­ing or a splash, a loon popped up less than five meters in front of me.

I stopped swimming.
I could tell by the size it was a male, and they look a lot big­ger at eye lev­el than they do from a kayak.
The loon (not the one on the pho­to, I can’t swim with a cam­era) turned his head and looked at me. “Hel­lo,” I  said qui­et­ly. “You’re rather beautiful.”
he loon looked around, stared at me, then ducked his head under­wa­ter in search of fish.
After sev­er­al sec­onds, he lift­ed it, and looked at me again,  He was, as only a bird that can dive to 70 meters and stay sub­merged for up to three min­utes would be, total­ly unper­turbed by a mere human tread­ing water.
Then he tipped for­ward and dis­ap­peared as sud­den­ly and silent­ly as he had popped up.
I’ll take that brief encounter as life enrich­ment over loud music and sup­ple­ments any time…no mat­ter what age I man­age to reach.
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