indifferenthonest

Alan Watts’ voice is a lot nicer than Snuggles’, too.

The bus, especially when your total commute including walking to and from and waiting, is 40 minutes, is not a great place to read. There’s a lot of distraction, you have to keep looking up to check that your stop isn’t coming up, the words bounce around, people want to talk about why you’re reading something about Danish dreams, are you Danish?, etc. The bus is a great place to listen to audiobooks and lectures. (I have a lot of audiobooks and lectures. Never you mind where I got them.) You can do this during the to/fro/waiting parts, you don’t have to stop while you watch for your stop, fewer people interrupts you because you’ve got headphones on and are clearly listening to something, and buses are just distracting enough to allow for real focus on listening.

So I listened to some (Discworld) books, and then to some lectures. I don’t remember which one I started with, but it’s the Robert Solomon lectures on Existentialism from The Teaching Company that are important, because they’re amazing. Robert Solomon is a comfortable man to listen to, comfortable in a Fred “Mister” Rogers or Dalai Lama way, which is a very good thing in a man who’s talking to you about Heidegger and Sarte and the nature of personal responsibility. (You may remember him from such films as Waking Life, where he had a cameo as a philosophy professor.) I could go on about how amazing he was, but I think you should just inter-library-loan yourself ahold of his Existentialism lectures now instead. This would be a better use of your time, and I need to get on to my main point, which is this: they were too awesome, these lectures.

Because of this awesomeness, one night when I got home I did not stop listening. I kept the mp3 player on while I petted the cats and made dinner. This worked pretty well. While no one should need something extra to occupy their attention while petting cats, because cats are fully as awesome as any lecture or audiobook, even read by Nigel Planer, could be, unless I’m frantically trying to read upside down the chou-fleur with beurre noir recipe I’m making for the first time while it’s boiling over on the stove, cooking dinner is often less than totally engaging, and an audiobook is just the thing to occupy you while slicing the carrots.

Since then, for I guess two or three months now, I have pretty much been occupied 100% of the time. I listen to the audiobooks while walking, cleaning (the little I do), playing with cats, cooking, eating, brushing my teeth, and waiting to fall asleep. Mira has largely been doing the same thing. Our conversations happen while the book is paused. I have, while not actually at work, working, been listening to someone talk all the time (sometimes this is David Attenborough or Simon Schama and there are pictures of animals and castles and things that I look at instead of just listening), with three exceptions. 1. While actually with-eyes reading books. B. While exercise biking, when I watched silly movies (Our Man Flint) or Babylon 5 episodes. iii. While sitting there, concentrating on my breathing and trying not to think for about 20 minutes a day.

A couple days ago, that just sitting there got extended to way more than 20 minutes, not on purpose. I stared at the bookcase across from me for a few hours. Later, I went upstairs and laid in bed and stared at my eyelids for another few. When I couldn’t fall asleep there, and seemed like I was going to keep Mira from doing so, I went back downstairs and sat in the chair again, in the dark this time, for another hour or so until I eventually fell asleep. The next day, very tired, I forgot my headphones on my scramble to the bus, and since my carrying-around book is in my desk at work, I had to just sit there on the bus.

That night, I was thinking about these things. Since I recognized even at the time that this really was not a super-sane thing I had been doing, hypnotically staring at a bookcase for hours, I was surprised at how much better I felt without actually doing anything. Later while I was brushing my teeth I came to the conclusion that this is because it is that constant stimulation that is really not super-sane. I came up with the perfect analogy to explain it, too, but because I was sure I’d remember I didn’t write it down, and now I can remember the bristles on my gums, but not my analogy (the shape of it feels like it had something to do with dreams).

It was too much. I sneer at heavy television watchers because television’s main goal is to constantly distract you and pull your attention away to the external, but I was doing the same thing. Granted, I was doing it with Alan Watts and not Snuggles the fabric-softening bear, but what the hell was I thinking would be the result of the constant occupation of my attention with these external stimuli, if not constant preoccupation? What sort of dissonant worldview does it take to schedule yourself a 20-minute break from your self-inflicted distracted state so that you can practice mindfulness?

Today I spent several hours by myself. I played the guitar, and the keyboard, and stared into space for a while (on purpose this time). And wrote this (sorry, I meant it to be short, but didn’t have enough time). I did listen to a book on the bus (because George R R Martin may be sort of creepy and very dorky, but he breaks all kinds of rules about what directions your narrative is allowed to go and has written one of the most original takes on zombies since that whole Easter thing in the Bible) and while I was reducing my curry. This feels like it may still be too much, and I think I’m going to need at least one day a week where I don’t listen to anything at all.

I don’t eat meat now, of course, but when I did I was very fond of ham sandwiches. I always prefered the ham be shaved thin, translucent, so it would barely hold together. The Frugal Gormet told me (and other Viewers Like Me) one day that this is because there is more room for air when you have very thin slices than one slab, and the air lets more of the flavor get to you.

Filed by shaun at December 19th, 2007 under indifferenthonest