The main reason being that I love music. In fact, Spotify told me that in 2014 I listened to 42,658 minutes of music.....the equivalent of 29.6 solid days of music listening. Haha! Not surprised. And when I'm not listening to music, I'm usually talking to a friend or listening to a podcast or watching a TV show. I listen to music when I'm running, when I'm driving, when I'm working, when I'm showering (yep), when I'm cooking (hhahahah JOKE -- I never do that), when I'm.....just always. I'm always filling my silences in one way or another, I guess.
Today I went running after work, out in the Baylands. The Baylands are basically a giant marsh full of....swampiness and....random birds and.....water and.....bay............haha. Well, it's nice and scenic once you get past any of the stagnant puddles and the industrial equipment at the head of the trails.
I'm a staunch believer in listening to music while I run, because it pumps me up and distracts me and......OK real reason, I like that it drowns out my distressed breathing. If I ever hear my own heavy breathing while I'm in the "I want to die" warm-up parts of a run, I am immediately convinced that I must stop because I am, in fact, going to die. So, music with a beat it is. And boots with da fur. (No?)
When I was out among the marshiness at the end-ish of one of the trails today, I paused to take a picture and accidentally switched my music off in the process. I was immediately struck by what I heard because......I heard nothing. I stopped and kept listening, and I did hear some things after all: the water moving, random birds in the distance.....but no cars. No people. No keyboards clattering. And it was beautiful.
I think I need to make a more deliberate effort to spend time in silence. And I realized today that maybe that means physically taking myself to places where distractions aren't immediately on hand -- no work to do, no people to talk to, no chores to be done, and nothing with me but my running shoes/shorts/shirt and my phone in airplane mode.
"The reinvention of daily life means marching off the edge of our maps."
1 comment:
I love the year-end review Spotify gives you! I got all excited waiting for it this year and opening mine up to see the embarrassing amount of time listening to music. I love it.
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