We sat down on logs next to the trail, I and 20 other middle schoolers, wondering why our hike had been paused. The camp director spoke quietly when he addressed us. “Everyone sitting down? Now close your eyes… listen. I don’t want to hear a word for two minutes. Just listen — and keep track of all the sounds you hear.”

I obediently closed my eyes and concentrated. Easy enough: I heard birdsong, an airplane, and the wind. Two minutes of this? I thought, I’ve heard everything already. But then I realized the wind made different sounds. In the bushes, the sound was soft and irregular, but in the forest canopy, it blew with a low roar. Then I heard another noise, incredibly loud, filling the forest around me. Humans, breathing. How had I missed it before? Slowly the sounds around me diversified. I identified different bird songs, heard the creaking of branches, wondered at the rumble of a far-away engine.

At the end of two minutes, the director explained that our brains usually tune out most background noises. But if we take time to really listen, we can enrich our experience of nature.

I remembered his remarkrecently when home for winter break. It was a quiet day, and I sat alone in the living room, reading “All the Light We Cannot See” by Anthony Doerr. His protagonist Marie-Laure LeBlanc is blind, so descriptions of her surroundings emphasize auditory imagery over visual. After one particularly poignant description of sounds, I set the book down and closed my eyes, curious to learn what I could hear.

I heard a clock ticking near me. Slow footsteps receding down a hallway. A faucet running. Appliances humming and beeping. A brother protesting. A dog snore. A distant door opening.

I was alone in the room, but from all around me came sounds of people occupied with their day-to-day. The afternoon's “silence” had transformed into a plethora of noises that made me suddenly grateful for family and ordinary tasks. My middle school camp director had taught me that careful listening can change how you experience nature. Now I realized that even the most ordinary of moments can be transformed when you enjoy background sounds.

Without our brain’s ability to filter noises, we would be overwhelmed with more information than we could ever process. But occasionally focusing on these "unimportant" noises can bring new and fascinating awareness of the world around us. This is the experience John Cage created when he composed “4’33’’” in 1952. The piece of music, which lasted four minutes and 33 seconds, consisted entirely of rests. Musicians sit on the stage but play nothing. The audience is left to listen to the normal sounds around them, the breathing, the murmuring, shifting, existing. Simple sounds, but beautiful, and usually taken for granted.

I, for one, refuse to take them for granted! I am grateful for breaths, for taps, for rumbles, for music, for speech, for whispers, for honks, for moans… even for beeps. I am grateful for the rich and diverse world of sound that is always waiting to be discovered.

What sounds surround you? And are you listening?