I rarely go to movies, don't rent them often and I don’t watch TV that much though it is on nearly all day. The Other Half turns it on, he’s fairly attentive to it, mostly it’s the chosen form of background noise, random and low maintenance. I don’t listen to music much either. I’m not really sure why that is because I like music and used to listen to it a great deal. I quit listening to the radio in the 80s when the ‘radio personality’ phenomenon broke out. I lost touch with what was new in music and the technology was changing so fast it was hard to keep up with. In the 90s we lost the capacity for music in the car as well. I guess I quit listening to music in the early 90s, a particularly tumultuous and change filled time in my life. I learned to listen to silence.
Silence is not really silent. Once you get past the voices in your head, there are all kinds of noises out there...traffic, birds, frogs, crickets, cicadas, the wind, the rain, the distant train, your own heartbeat.
I drive, absorbed in the recesses of my mind. I work, wandering around in various channels of thought. I listen to the world around me. I look at the pictures. I create things I can never recall. People would always comment on the lack of music in the car. ‘That would drive me crazy’, they’d say, ‘no music’ but I don’t mind. In the silence, I have come to know myself.
I'm not so good with complete silence these days. I tend to become distracted by too many thoughts and start worrying or fretting about things.I suppose that I need noise of some sort to truly focus on what I'm doing. I tend to listen to classical music for relaxation, but rock music for concentration.
ReplyDeleteOur kids gave us one of those record players that digitizes music. Perhaps I'll rediscover the joy of music.
ReplyDelete