What Goes Around..... you know the rest

_{Photo by Valentin Salja}

As a young man who grew up in one of the most noisiest city ever, the city of Lagos, I never really thought I would be out here writing about noise pollution and how it's affecting me presently. But like hiro-hive said in his post, we human have the ability to adjust to our environment and that was what happened to me the moment I moved out of Lagos to a much more quieter place.

And I'm not gonna lie, for a moment there, I allowed myself to get a little bit delusional thinking that I had escaped all of that craziness but it turned out that wasn't the case. I may have left the place, but I soon realized that the place never left me.

As a student, I live in a typical "face me, I face you" kinda building. What that means is that in the long hall of that building, each room is directly facing each other, my niegbors window is directly opposite my door, and my door is directly opposite someone else's window.

_{I apologise for the picture quality, I literally just took that tonight. But this is a picture of the hallway and you can see each room facing each other.}

So what that meant was that you hear almost every kind of noise coming out from your neighbours room, all the way from yours. And at first this wasn't a problem because the neighbours never really got noisy unless there was electricity (which rarely happens) and everyone is playing different kind of songs on their speakers.

But then I went ahead and got myself one of those rechargeable bluetooth speaker, the loud ones. And to my defense, I never really did anything crazy with it, like play it early in the morning or late at night, it was mostly during the day and most times all I do is watch movies with it because the sound makes the whole thing much more interesting to watch.

But the truth of the matter was that just because I played it during the day didn't mean I wasn't disturbing someone else, I mean they obviously were people trying to rest during the day that I probably was disturbing but I just didn't think of it at that time. Based on the place I was coming from, I felt it was normal to play loud sounds at that time and no one would care, but it turned out that they did care.

Someone had brought it up during one of the hostel meetings and of course no one sided with them because as long as it was during the day, it was cool. But then my neighbor, the guy who stays directly opposite my window, went ahead and got himself his own bluetooth speaker and for some reason he enjoys playing old people songs very early in the morning.

Of course I found this irritating, not his choice of music, but mainly due to the fact that he plays it early in the morning. But each time I think about approaching him to talk to him about it, my conscience reminds me of myself and the noises I make during the day, so I back down and just endure. Hopefully, my body gets to adapt quickly to this new alarm or else I will pay the price because I don't do so well when I don't get enough sleep.

Anyways, what was that they said about karma again?