Listen Closely to What the Voices Are Saying

I’d finally had enough.

The rattle echoing through the vents in our home had started waking us up at night. Every time the furnace turned on, the noise would come back, persisting for a few minutes before fading back into silence. It was abrupt and loud enough that every time it happened it would yank us out of sleep.

One morning, just a few nights ago (about 2:30 a.m.) I was jolted awake again. Lying there, listening to it cycle on and off, I decided it was time to figure out what was causing it, even if that meant cutting a hole in the basement ceiling where the sound seemed loudest.

I’d listened in the room where the furnace sits a few times before, but the sound always seemed louder outside the utility closet. I reasoned that the issue had to be somewhere in the ductwork between the furnace and the bathroom across the hall.

That morning, though, I decided to listen more closely to the furnace for any subtle hints at what might be causing the sound. I stepped into the utility closet and closed the door behind me, muting the noise in the hallway.

That’s when I heard it.

The faint, almost imperceptible clanking of a small copper tube against the galvanized pipe that brings natural gas in from outside. I slid my fingers between the two pipes, and the sound stopped immediately.

What was barely audible in the utility closet had been echoing through the entire house like a loose piece of ducting flapping inside the vents. There was just enough vibration in the line for the copper pipe to repeatedly tap the galvanized one, amplifying a tiny contact into a sleep-disrupting noise.

As I found a small piece of pipe insulation and wedged it between the two, a thought occurred to me: how often, in life, do we allow something insignificant to become a major source of disruption?

There was another parallel, too. The problem was amplification not initial volume. A small, rapid contact was creating a vibration in the gas line that traveled up into the ceiling where the gas line is pressed against the HVAC ducting. The vibration was amplified a hundred-fold in the empty cavity of the duct.

In life, there are quieter voices that can actually help us solve our problems but they require is to cut through the noise of the louder ones. Why is it, so often, that the people with the least to say are the loudest and use the most words?

I think about this now and then when I remember Nancy Squires.

In the days leading up to her death from ovarian cancer, I sat next to her bed holding her hand while she spoke softly. Even when she was my 12th grade English teacher, her voice was almost never forceful. Now, weakened by cancer, the softness of her voice somehow commanded even more attention. In the quiet space of the hospice care facility, I listened to the voice of someone who had already lived through more than enough.

I don’t remember the specific words she said to me that day. I wish I did. I wish I’d taken the time to write down any of the wisdom she imparted over the years I knew her. I do remember the weight of her words. I remember leaving our conversations changed in ways I wasn’t equipped to articulate at the time.

On October 1, 1996, I was in her classroom just to talk. I know because I wrote about it in my journal that day. She’d lost her son to cancer a few years earlier. He would have only been a few years older than I was. Around the same time, I’d lost my mother to cancer. Nancy, her son, and my mother are all buried in the same cemetery. It’s a fact that feels strange yet somehow connecting all these years later.

Nancy taught from a raised podium that kind of reminded me of the kind of rostrum a judge occupies. Nancy wasn’t there to judge us, though. Even before the cancer, Nancy had a hard time standing for long periods of time, but she wanted to be present with her students. More than that, however, she wanted us to know we were seen.

We called her Aunt Nancy or sometimes Granny Nan.

Her voice didn’t compete with the room. She was too soft-spoken for that. (Now that I think about it, she actually had a gavel to get our attention. It’s funny. I’d completely forgotten that detail until just now.)

When Nancy spoke, though, you knew it was time to listen. The way she spoke to us earned her the quiet.

That’s the thing about voices worth listening to. They don’t demand attention or interrupt. They don’t clatter through the ductwork of our lives, waking us up in the middle of the night demanding attention.

They wait.

Sitting in the utility closet, fingers pressed between two pipes, it struck me how much of my attention gets stolen by noise that doesn’t matter. It’s so easy for me to let disruption become importance, and I’ve spent so much of my life chasing echoes instead of sources.

The furnace wasn’t broken. The sound that kept waking us wasn’t telling me anything useful about the furnace itself. It was just vibration amplified by empty space.

Nancy’s voice was the opposite of that. Her voice wasn’t one of those that gets amplified by harsh words shared among friends over different political views. Her voice stayed close, with the confines of her classroom and the hospice care room.

It stayed with me.

I think part of growing older is learning which voices deserve our time. It’s learning to recognize the difference between what’s true and what’s just loud. It’s finally beginning to understand how to set aside what demands attention but doesn’t deserve it so we can focus on what offers actual wisdom.

Some voices will always shout. They want all the oxygen in the room and will fill every available space if we let them. But the ons that matter most—the ones that shape us, steady us, and remind us who we are—rarely do.

They speak softly.

And they require us to listen closely.