Noise
Since I can remember, I have always needed noise. When I was young, I used to listen to Adventures in Odyssey tapes at night to go to sleep. They would help me fall asleep and then when the tape would end, the click would wake me and I would switch the tape over and listen to the next side. I did this until I got a CD player and began listening to music. At first I listened to music I loved but then that kept me up because I was singing the words so I switched to classical music. By the time I had a TV in my room, I watched TV to go to sleep. I still do that to this day. But it isn’t just sleep, I have sound all the time. When I wake up and start to get ready for work, I watch some show on my phone or I scroll TikTok. When I walk the dog in the morning and afternoon, I have my headphones playing gospel music. In the car, it’s music or a podcast. Reading a book= music in the background. At work= music. Working out=music or the sound of the video I am working out to. Cleaning=music. Painting=music. Writing this=music. Of course sometimes I have multiple sounds going on at the same time- a tv and music, people and music, people and a tv. But I am very rarely without sound. Silence makes me uncomfortable.
You know at the movies during the previews, there is this silence between one preview and the next and it only lasts a few seconds but during those few seconds, I giggle. Something about that many people in a space being quiet at the same time even for a few seconds makes me so uncomfortable that I laugh.
I do my best work with sound. I get the most inspired by music. I love a good tv show or movie to wind down. I love to listen to my friends and family talk and laugh. I love the ambiance that music can create in a group of people. Sound is my most used sense. I am so thankful for the gift of sound.
AND YET.
Sound has crippled me in some ways because I have used it wrong. I have used it to drown out my own voice. To drown out God’s voice. I am too scared of what is there. What I may say or think or hear or NOT hear. I am too scared of what the silence will do to me.
We all have these distractions, dopamine hits that take us out of our own thoughts and our own head and put us somewhere else: inside of a song, inside of a story, inside of a character or a movie. We can be transported to a different time and place through sound and picture. I can listen to the same song twice in a row and one time be transported into the song as if I am being sung to or being sung about and the next time I listen to the same song, I will imagine myself performing the song. On a stage in front of a crowd. Songs can do that. Movies can do that. Books can do that. These creative projects of the humans who make them are creating art with their talent and they spread their art to us for the purpose of transporting us to a different world. They want us to get out of our own heads for brief moments. That’s healthy I think. Expressions of art, whether my own in my writing or painting or through someone else’s by listening to music or reading a great book or watching a wonderfully written tv show, are wonderful moments. But they are moments. Moments to step outside of ourselves and then when need to come back to ourselves.
Sounds have transported me for far too long I think. I didn’t just step away from myself for a brief period to get transported into another world and then come back better. I stayed gone. I have distracted myself from my own thoughts and my own voice for 30 years. I have used art, the art of others and my own art to express myself and there is value in that, I want to be clear. I have gained so much from music and books and shows and painting and creativity but what I have not learned to do yet, as a 40 year old, is hear myself.
Glennon Doyle talks about ‘sinking into her body’. I know what she means, I have had moments of this and her description is perfect. It feels like sinking into yourself…when your shoulders lower and your limbs release a bit and your core drops into this deep position that doesn’t feel like its priority in that moment is to hold your body upright. And then you just sit there, with yourself and yourself alone and know you are okay. You are held and you have answers deep within you where that core is sitting and if you never feel it, how will you ever know when you are working against it? I don’t really know because as I said, I do not do it….but tonight, tonight I start. I take a few minutes to sit in silence, to sink into myself and my body and just listen to her. Not correct her (that will be very hard) but just listen to her. And then after a few minutes, I will use another few minutes to try to listen to God in me and see what He says and where he leads me. And then I will still go to bed with music and I will wake up and listen to some more sounds but I will learn to not be afraid of my thoughts. They are mine after all and they have yet to make me combust and they are there whether I acknowledge them or not so I might as well listen to them and learn from them before I sleep or go about my day.
