the vacuum. emptiness and silence. it was almost too quiet. as if the sounds of the outside world had been sucked away and all that remained was a vaguely disconcerting pressure imbalance exerting a weak push against the eardrums. woven throughout that imbalance was the quiet shush of balanced white noise. while jacked into the rear panel of my custom-built workstation, the electronically generated anti-sound is interrupted momentarily by the faintest whirrs and beeps. absence of outside noise was the purpose of course, as i gently remove the earcups and feel their considerable weight in my hands.
the headphones just arrived today; designed for heavy use at the racetrack, they are built with 12db noise reduction for filtering out low frequency ambient sound.
why?
loud upstairs neighbors.
young people, like me. there have been loud neighbors before, but the situation was somewhat different then. the previous neighbors were Big People. as in, elephants in vaguely humanoid form. stomping around at all hours with television/stereo pushing noise through the floor. of course, that was a matter of intentional disrespect. they have since moved out, and i may recount the story later.
but with the current neighbors, there is a sense of diurnal rhythm. they are normal-sized, don't leave their television on all the time, and are quiet at night. so i feel less compelled to create a physical incentive for them to change their behaviors; if i was a teenager living in an apartment building, i would want to listen with the volume up.
unfortunately, i've got work to do.
during the day, when i am not at a client, i work out of my office space in the apartment. at this point, a quiet working environment is essential for the creative thoughts to emerge, recombine and eventually express themselves as solutions and ideas. when only the loudest, most obvious ideas can be heard, the less apparent ones -- that are often the most useful tools in solving problems -- are often drowned out. given that i am building this business with creativity rather than experience, the ability to listen to the small voices is essential in working around obstacles.
in buying headphones though, i feel as if something isn't exactly as it should be. having found their resting position suspended from the craning neck of an old matte-black desk lamp whose days of illumination have long since past, i regard the phones impassively for a long moment. as the thoughts begin to reveal themselves, motivations and reasons stumble forward into view. eventually the line of reasoning with strongest explanatory power becomes apparent. isolated as a variant of flawed logic, i open the lid and take a closer look.
i recognize the underlying concept as an instance of the general mistake that most habitual consumers make: building a castle to keep enemies out. instead of working with the situation to find the answer from the inside, this concept encourages the simplistic answer -- block out the cause of the problem by adding a layer of "protection" against unwanted intrusion.
to extend the negative aspects of the metaphor, a castle creates immobility and implies that the world is to be escaped from when possible; that the world is to be controlled as an entity external to and divorced from oneself. my understanding of things, however, is directly opposite to that idea: i am part of the world, and as a creature with inevitably limited knowledge and power, i am not in control. it seems that to attempt control of the external world is rather like praying for rain from a cloudless sky.
having understood the flaw in my reasoning that was bothering me, i consider an alternative solution. the alternative lies in finding a way to adapt rather than fight; to adopt an intelligent strategy rather than buy a crutch that protects me for the moment while leaving the underlying problem untouched. in this case, the problem is not the noise itself, but my interpretation of the sound. i can remember many times, intentional and not so, in which my mind simply turned off the perception of external sound -- during intense concentration, for example. what if i could selectively filter out the audible noises around me at any time, regardless of the source or environment?
that seems to be a skill worth looking into. and once mastered, i won't need to pretend that i can control the world by paying for temporary peace of mind; i will learn how to create it for myself.
audio: david last, cham and beenie man . vitamin s [david last mix]