When our eyes get tired, we close them.
When our skin is exposed to the sun, we protect it.
When our muscles ache, we slow down and let them recover.
But when was the last time you thought about your ears?
To be honest, most of us probably never do.
Perhaps because they rarely complain. They don’t become visibly red after a long day. They don’t ask us to blink or stretch. They simply keep listening.
And maybe that is exactly why we expect so much from them.
Ironically, every time we try to give our eyes a break, we ask our ears to work even harder.
We replace books with audiobooks. We switch from scrolling to podcasts. We wear headphones while working, exercising, commuting, studying—even while trying to fall asleep. Earphones have become part of our outfits as much as our accessories.
Without realizing it, we’ve turned listening into a full-time job.
Yet our ears do far more than deliver sounds.
They help us stay balanced, literally. They constantly collect information about our surroundings, allowing us to locate danger, recognize familiar voices, enjoy music, learn languages, and communicate with one another. Every sound we hear is translated into electrical signals before our brain turns them into something meaningful.
They quietly connect us with the world.
And they have always meant more than anatomy alone.
Across different cultures, ears symbolize attention, wisdom, obedience, and the willingness to receive truth. Protective earrings have been worn for centuries, believed to ward off harmful spirits. In my own culture, when we hear something unpleasant, we gently pull one of our earlobes—as if hoping those words never become part of our reality.
Perhaps people have always understood that ears deserve a certain kind of respect.
Time, however, reminds us how fragile they are.
Every passing year changes what we can hear. Our ability to detect high frequencies gradually fades, often so slowly that we never notice it happening. Somewhere around us, a bird may still be singing exactly the same song it always has. The sound hasn’t disappeared. Our ears have simply become unable to meet it.
Perhaps that is one of the reasons I enjoy listening to classical music now rather than saving it for later.
People around me often say, “I’ll appreciate classical music when I’m older. Right now is the time for louder, livelier things.” I understand what they mean. But I sometimes wonder if we assume our ears will always be waiting for us.
The truth is, they won’t.
The ears I have today are not the ears I will have twenty or thirty years from now. The delicate overtones of a violin, the quiet resonance of a piano, the subtle layers hidden inside an orchestra—some of them may gradually become harder to hear. Not because the music has changed, but because I have.
It reminds me of how easily we adapt to volume. A new pair of headphones can seem overwhelmingly loud at first, yet after a while the same setting feels perfectly normal. We keep turning the volume up, rarely noticing that our hearing has quietly adapted—or quietly faded.
Perhaps some sounds are not meant to be postponed.
Maybe that is also why silence is not an absence at all.
It is a form of care.
Research suggests that intentional periods of silence may reduce stress hormones, support emotional regulation, improve attention, and even encourage changes in the brain associated with learning and memory. We often think of silence as something empty, but perhaps it is one of the richest gifts we can offer our minds—and our ears.
We spend our lives asking our ears to listen.
To conversations.
To notifications.
To traffic.
To music.
To the endless soundtrack of modern life.
Yet we rarely ask what they need in return.
Perhaps they ask for two things.
Moments of silence.
And beautiful sounds while they are still able to hear them in all their richness.
Don’t save them for another season of your life.
Your ears are growing older, too.
Artwork: The Great Wave off Kanagawa, Katsushika Hokusai.
Additional note: Claude Debussy admired this iconic woodblock print so deeply that a cropped version of it was chosen for the cover of the first published edition of La Mer (1905), one of the most celebrated orchestral works inspired by the sea.1
Between Everywhere and Nowhere 
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