I have started an experiment. I recently have had moments where everything has just seemed too loud. Have you ever had these moments, dear reader? Just when you become really aware of all the noise around you. It doesn't even need to be loud noise but just SOME noise. The ticking of a clock, air conditioning, the wind, cars in the street outside, the hum of the TV. So much noise! It's constant. It's kind of a cliche but with our "busy" lives these days (I am surely not busy enough right now to justify me saying that but whatever) it's actually very hard to find silence. Some people might suggest going out into nature, which for me is actually very easy. There is literally a forest over the road. In Helsinki. I love Finland. But for me that's no good. There is still noise, especially with it being spring. Every bird and insect is screaming it's lungs out in a desperate bid to pass on it's genetic material. I don't want relaxing bird calls, I want silence.
So, as I said, I have started an experiment. It is HIGHLY unscientific and really has nothing at all to do with science. What I have done is to purchase a pair of ear defenders like what builders have. It is my intention to, in the next week, use them every now and then, I'll be going for at least once a day for... a period of time. Now whether this will actually achieve anything at all, whether I'll come out of this with the patience and temperament of a Buddhist monk, have auditory hallucinations or just simply get bored of it, I don't know but it might make a good blog post so let's do it. I'll speak to you again in a week, though of course the time elapsed for you will be the time it takes to scroll down. It's like time travel or something...
...
WELL... it's actually been 2 weeks... and 4 days. I didn't feel one week was sufficient time and I may have forgotten to write this but now is a perfectly good time to put down some stuff for your enjoyment and to ensure that I can still write long pieces of text and order them in such a way that they are legible and perhaps (if the planets are properly aligned) enjoyable. So anyway:
I did not, unfortunately, get the chance to use the ear defenders everyday which was my intention; it's surprisingly difficult to find time to lie down and not hear anything. However I have, I believe, used them now on enough occasions to talk about it. Which is nice.
There are (at least for me) a number of stages that you go through when you opt for silence, firstly everything goes quiet (Wow! Revolutionary!), then as your ears adjust something a bit weird happens and you hear your own heartbeat. Now I'm still not sure if the vibrations are coming from my heart or my arteries, if what I'm hearing is what I would hear in complete silence or if I'm only hearing it due to the pressure of the earphones on my ears. Does this matter? No. What I'm saying is that you hear your own blood. Which is nice. Second stage you seem to start filtering out the blood sound and then you hear the sound of all of the collective damage that you've inflicted upon your ears. The whine of every concert, every building site, every time you've played music too loud through your headphones on the bus, comes back to haunt you like a sonic ghost (great name for a band by the way Sonic Ghost...) which makes you feel very guilty. Soon this gets filtered out as well by your brain and what you are left with is... weird. It's not silence exactly it's just... nothing. But also not nothing. Have you ever been in a really quiet place and it feels like you kind of have to make a noise just to stop your head feeling all weird from all the silence? Well that's what it's like.
Now at this point you are probably thinking I've just described a hellish, nightmarish scenario and you are, as you read this, humming loudly and turning the radio up, but please understand although all these things are weird they are also so refreshing. It's really strange just how much background noise there is in a silent room. It's really quite deafening and such a relief to get away from it for a little while.
Now one thing that I'm sure you all already know about, if you actually read my posts, is that I like thinking. Can't get enough of it actually. Leave me in an empty room long enough and I'll be having an internal debate with myself within the hour. Now thinking is bloody hard if there is even the slightest distraction for me. I have been cursed with a desire to always be considering life, death the universe and everything but with an attention and concentration span about as long as... Hey look a pretty butterfly!
So how has complete silence helped in this regard? Well it actually makes it worse. At first. It's very hard to think when you can hear your own blood supply wooshing around and the background hum of your auditory sins is incredibly distracting but once past these first hurdles, into the realm of weird silence, then your mind feels weirdly open. My imagination felt a lot free-er without any sound to break my concentration. I've never had a lucid dream (I really want to lucid dream but it still hasn't happened. Some day...) but I would imagine that this came fairly close to it.
I was once taught by my psychology teacher at college a relaxation technique that I have never forgotten and I can tell you it has safely carried me to the Land of Nod on many a sleepless night and combined with this weird silence it was like relaxation on maximum setting and brought on my almost lucid dream-like feeling. The technique on it's own is incredibly effective (at least for me) and when my psychology teacher demonstrated it to the class I almost fell asleep at my desk. It's based around the idea of... well lets say it takes up all the bandwidth of your mind and prevents you from being able to worry or think about things that make you tensed up or stressed.
I wasn't planning on giving out this secret in this post (I was going to save it for a different post) but screw it, I might as well do it now:
First get into a comfortable position (lying down is probably best) and concentrate on your breathing. Slow and calm is the way to go.
Next imagine a red number 7 right in front of you. I usually imagine it on a whiteboard being drawn or painted onto a wall. Focus on the colour and shape of the 7 and nothing else. Fix it in your mind's eye.
Once you have it clear in front of you (It may take a few minutes. Be patient, no need to rush) watch as the red 7 fades away and is replaced with an orange 6. Again focus on the colour and the shape.
Once the orange 6 is clear in front of you watch it fade and be replaced with a yellow 5. Again same drill. Fix it, then fade it.
Next number is a green 4.
Then a blue 3.
After that a purple 2.
Last number is a white 1.
The 1 then turns into a light which moves around in front of you. You follow it and it leads you up 3 steps which you count as you step up them. 1, 2, 3. In front of you is a door. On the other side of the door is a place where you feel safe, secure, relaxed and free to do what you want. It can be a real or imagined place as long as it's relaxed and keeps you calm.
And that's it. Spend as long as you like in your new imagined calm place and forget all your troubles. If you want to come out of the calm place just retrace your steps back through the door, down the steps and count back through the numbers. I know it all sounds like hippy dippy crap but trust me it's so refreshing. Focussing on the colour and shape of the number takes up all the processing power of your mind and, if you are concentrating properly, it's very hard to think of other things because there is simply no room. Now this is most effective if you have someone else read out the steps to you as this then takes up the auditory part of your brain's processing power as well as the visual part. Of course if this isn't possible you could always go for complete silence...
Which is what I tried and I must say it works very well IF you choose the right moment to start at. Start too soon while you can still hear blood swooshing around in side of you and it's quite hard to concentrate but once you reach that point where the silence is just right your mind just get's carried away. Pretty soon I was walking around imaginary islands and seeing entirely make-believe vistas and quickly falling asleep incredibly peacefully.
So, just a relaxation technique and a bit of peace and I was exploring mental landscapes far removed from reality. What I found really strange was even without lying down and thinking about colourful numbers, just experiencing a much quieter world, I started feeling quite separate from what was going on around me.
It's really quite strange how detached you can feel from other people that may be sitting right next to you just by blocking out the sounds they are making. You have only your eyesight to confirm that they are there and it's suddenly very clear how even the sound of moving clothing or the other person's breathing or the other minute sounds they make, inform you, consciously or unconsciously, that you are not alone (I know you are thinking about farts. Well stop it. It's just childish. I'm trying to build up to a serious point here). Within only a few minutes of putting on the ear defenders, I start feeling a bit dissociated from everything around me. It starts off subtly but pretty soon you are wondering if you are doing that thing people do when they listen to music really loud through their headphones and just lose all sense of how loud they are. I swear one time during the last 2 weeks (I can't remember when. So scientific!) I started typing on the computer louder than usual. I only noticed when I saw how excessively hard I was tapping the keys. The sound of the keys had, it seemed, been helping to control how my fingers were moving. That's pretty cool. But then again also terrifying. What if I damaged my hearing? How long would it take for me to adjust? How would I cope? What impact would it have on my life? Would I become completely dissociated from reality unable to really connect with what is going on around me?
Now of course I am entirely aware that there are people in the world either born deaf or with some form of hearing difficulty or they have, later in their life, acquired damage to their hearing and they live perfectly happy and fulfilled lives. I have no idea what it would be like to have any of these conditions and I would have to be pretty ignorant to think I could get any inkling of what it would be like to live with them on a day-to-day basis from putting on some headphones a few times a week. It comes purely from myself and my own personal experiences when I say that it's kind of scary how dependent I am on my hearing, how easy it is to damage it and how terrifying it would be for me to lose my hearing. I, like pretty much everyone, like to think I can cope with bad things happening in my life. If I lost a leg in a car accident, I would find a way to cope. If I was paralyzed, I would work around it. Nothing is going to hold me back from my dreams! But how sure can I be? Would I really be able to cope with such a massive life change? Even the slightest hint of reduced hearing capability has got me losing touch with reality, what would permanent loss do?
This is all speculation and until (well hopefully I never will) experience it I will never know how I will react. It's not just hearing but all possible bad things. Who knows how you will cope with something or if you will cope at all. All I know is that I don't really want to find out how I would cope with it because that would mean experiencing it and so I have a new found respect for my hearing and have already taken steps to preserve it, my MP3 player is now at volume levels that my past self would be scoffing at but I have learnt a valuable lesson I won't soon forget.
Too Long/Didn't Read (TL/DR): Silence is golden but don't take your hearing for granted.
