Finally, after living my entire life at 120 decibels, after hearing my brothers playing and arguing for 18 years, and then my own children playing and arguing for 18 years, and phones ringing all over the house, and kids’ friends running up and down the stairs, and cars coming and leaving, and dogs barking and garage doors opening and shutting.

It’s quiet.

It dawned on me today that I haven’t really noticed how quiet life has become. It’s like a giant hush has descended on my days and today it reached a level where it was discernible.

“Where is everyone?” I asked out loud to no one, save for my dog who doesn’t really bark anymore.

I stopped watching television more than eight years ago, beyond the news and a few programs that are worth watching, so there’s very little background noise in my life.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the quiet has taken place in me. And I think it’s something that happens to everyone as they grow older.

Think about walking into your grandparents house as a kid; I just remember thinking old people were quiet.

There was a kind of quiet at a grandparents’ house that seemed odd compared to your own house. Your grandfather was in a chair reading and maybe your grandmother was in the kitchen making dinner and humming softly to herself. You could hear the little tick of the clock in the hall and the birds out back in the trees. If you stayed overnight, a part of you longed for the bustle of your own home, because all that quiet stuff was nice for awhile, but what was normal for you was to be in a house with 160 decibels, with your siblings and the phones ringing and dishes clanking and hammering coming from the basement.

Those sounds were the music of life, because in the thick of life your world is noisy and full and clamorous as it should be. The act of living itself is to fill the world with something and in creating that something we make noise as we do it. We yell at our kids, we start the car, we close the cupboard doors.

There’s very little that we do that is silent in our young lives, except to pray in church or fall asleep.

There’s more than a few studies that warn that chaotic households lower children’s IQs, create stress and disrupt sleeping patterns. But I knew very few quiet homes when I was young. The houses in my neighborhood harbored four, five, six kids or more and often the noise of their homes spilled out to the street where we played. The outdoors provided the only relief to the mothers of big families. It was an hour of sanity in the middle of the day.

But there comes a time when that noise clears and not just because the kids have left, but because you have been smoothed over like a pebble in a creek, and all the noisy, jagged edges of life are no longer. We become more introverted, more balanced like a kind of fine wine that mellows with age.

And thankfully, we seem to become more emotionally stable and agreeable, as we leave our youthful days behind. We are quieter, and softer. We need less excitement to be happy, less chaos.

If the task of the first half of our lives was to put ourselves out there to find mates and start families, maybe the task of the second half is to make sense of where we’ve been.

If you’re like me, and you find that your life has become more about pursuing peace and relaxation than giddy excitement, I promise you that you aren’t missing out on happiness. Because happiness evolves, just as we do. And just because it isn’t like the Daytona 500 doesn’t mean it isn’t good.

It’s just a mellower good to be sure.