blinkered
I'm not sure what the day will hold for me. Last night, my son coaxed me onto the floor for a Spiderman wrestling match. Somehow, my glasses, perched on my forehead, took the worst of one of his Spiderman blows. I thought I'd fixed them with a big, blurry set of pliers (pretty hard to fix glasses when you can't actually see them properly), but a few minutes ago, they fell off my face. My spare glasses are old, weak, from days long passed when I was considerably less Mr. McGoo-esque. So I'm looking at the world through a blurry kind of a fog.
It seems unlikely that I'll be able to do much writing, even 21 words/hour. So perhaps what I'll do is spend a bit more time listening. By strange coincidence, I spent a few minutes on the weekend looking over the promo materials for this book. Long time readers will know that I developed somewhat of an obsession with environmental sound last year while on sabbatical in a setting that presented more of an interesting mix of sounds than the low industrial hum that surrounds me here most of the time. Also, some of the peak experiences I've had while meditating have been connected with sounds.
The trick, I remember, is to try to stop yourself from streaming sounds into their various sources (such as, from where I sit -- the conversation of an IT staffer, the water cooler, my computer fan, my clicking keyboard, some kind of construction machinery outside my window, a lawnmower, a blackbird, traffic, my breathing) and, instead, to appreciate the soundstream as one very complicated, endlessly renewing, inconstant, never repeating mixture. As hard as this is to do, I find it much easier to manage to avoid naming and categorizing sounds than I do images. And, once managed, even if only for a fraction of a second, life's impermanence becomes so obvious that all efforts to cling seem silly enough to provoke laughter.
It seems unlikely that I'll be able to do much writing, even 21 words/hour. So perhaps what I'll do is spend a bit more time listening. By strange coincidence, I spent a few minutes on the weekend looking over the promo materials for this book. Long time readers will know that I developed somewhat of an obsession with environmental sound last year while on sabbatical in a setting that presented more of an interesting mix of sounds than the low industrial hum that surrounds me here most of the time. Also, some of the peak experiences I've had while meditating have been connected with sounds.
The trick, I remember, is to try to stop yourself from streaming sounds into their various sources (such as, from where I sit -- the conversation of an IT staffer, the water cooler, my computer fan, my clicking keyboard, some kind of construction machinery outside my window, a lawnmower, a blackbird, traffic, my breathing) and, instead, to appreciate the soundstream as one very complicated, endlessly renewing, inconstant, never repeating mixture. As hard as this is to do, I find it much easier to manage to avoid naming and categorizing sounds than I do images. And, once managed, even if only for a fraction of a second, life's impermanence becomes so obvious that all efforts to cling seem silly enough to provoke laughter.
posted by Colin at 10:49 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home