Escaping what’s in our heads

QUIET

Usually, when I start the timer for the five-minute exercises, I turn music on. It’s most often classical (that’s my favorite music to write to).

This time, the prompt seemed to call for a different decision.

I turned the music off and decided just to write in silence (does it count as silence when the TV is blaring in the other room?).

I’m not a big fan of silence lately.

Maybe this is a shift many of us made as we have had our music/podcasts/audiobooks available at our fingertips (via our phones).

Back in the day, you would have to have a radio positioned in a room to be able to tune in to whatever you wanted to listen to (or — depending on your generation — a cassette player/dvd player/iPod dock for audiobooks and the like).

I’m still reflecting on a week ago, when I ate the same rations as a Syrian refugee.

Maybe this is an odd comparison to make, but that was another kind of subtraction of stimuli that I’ve come to depend on. Feel restless while editing? Grab some pretzels. Need a quick pick-me-up? Take a miniature candy bar out of the pantry.

We can become dependent on being able to escape the quiet in our heads in a way that seems somewhat similar to me.

I don’t like being anywhere without at least having white noise. I walk most days, and the thought of doing that without listening to something — anything — has no appeal.

Maybe I need to tune in to “me” sometimes instead of everyone else’s voices.

Welcome to this week’s Five Minute Friday. Our instructions, via coordinator Kate Motaung: “Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation.” (But I can’t resist spell-checking, as you can imagine.)