Assault

When is it quiet?

Never.

A year or so past, we had a power outage. I think I wrote about it in a ramble. I think it might have been the last time it was quiet.

Think about that. You know what you're doing? Thinking. Consider what we put ourselves through each day, almost every minute of each day. We are assaulted by noise; sounds such as our piped-in headphones and ear buds. Radio. Television. Background music when we visit a store. Nearly everyone walking down the street has something wired to their heads to listen to something. What that means is our senses are being assaulted, overloaded.

What have we become? A hundred years ago, there was none of this cacophony to dilute our brains. The sun went down, the lights came up and people went to sleep, or read a book, or talked among themselves. We do little of that now. We are tied to computers and devices to entertain ourselves. What is this need we feel to continually entertain ourselves?

In the past several days, I have begun to tune out some of this noise. It becomes nothing more than drivel. Long have I listened to sports-talk radio in my car as I drive to and from work. Even this has become tedious. It is the same thing over and over again. Know what I did? It turned it off. No music, no yapping. It was quiet with nothing more than the sounds of travel. I suppose the good thing is, I didn't hear any strange noises coming from my car.

In the dawn of the electronic era when radio and television began to invade our lives, it was original. It was unique. That was the entertainment value. To me, it has all lost its uniqueness. We should begin to choose our battles, choose what we allow to surround us. We take it all in and continue to take it in without a filter. When does it become an overload where we no longer think, where we no longer give thought to our surroundings, our world.

Music a half hour, television no more than two. Pick up a book. Go walking outside in the cold. Feel your senses again as you listen to nature and see the stars twinkling in the dark sky. Go buy a telescope and watch nature as you've never seen it before as your breath hovers in the darkness. It might make you think. Now, that's a unique proposition.