I had a comically bad day yesterday, like dropping things, almost lost my keys down the drain on the sidewalk, spilled soup at the store near a makeup section, almost tore my pants, got back from the store only to find out I was out of TP, etc.
It was more funny than anything else, like so much random trivial bad luck in one day is like something out of some 90s Tom Hanks comedy.
But there was one thing that actually annoyed me - on my way back from the store on my grocery trip, my phone suddenly went from a healthy 7% to 0% and died. I was stuck with no music for the remainder of the walk back.
Soooo I was forced to listen to the sound of well - nothing at all basically.
Just birds chirping, wind blowing, leaves rustling, all as I walked the same path I walk all the time and see the same things I’ve seen hundreds of times, just waiting to get home.
Don’t get me wrong I love where I live and everything, it’s a really cool city with good pedestrian infrastructure, I almost never even get close to a car and it’s not some smelly euro village either, but seeing the same things I’ve already seen and having no stimuli at all, it wasn’t that big a deal but it was unpleasant.
That got me thinking - I sometimes see folks not wearing earphones outside, and I’ve heard on more than one occasion from some acquaintances that they don’t listen to music outside, and I wonder - why’s that?
Why would you choose to do that?
And, what do y’all like, do, exactly? How do you deal with the monotony of your grocery trips or things like that when you don’t even have music on? Do you just never get bored of walking the same roads/neighborhoods w/e day after day?
I usually choose to have a podcast or music on, but sometimes it’s really nice to just appreciate my surroundings. I like to hear birdsong, or the wind, the rain. Even cars passing. It’s nice to be grounded in the world.
Even when I have music, I spend most of my time when I walk (which is a lot) not looking down at the ground. I look around, and I try to appreciate the little things. The other day, I noticed a really, really polished front door on a house I was walking past. The wood was so bright red and all of the metal was this gleaming silver, it was really striking! There are wild parakeets in the city I live in, so getting the chance to see these beautiful green birds swoop overhead is a treat, too. Where I live is quite hilly, so getting to see what I think are beautiful views of the urban sprawl interspersed with big tree plumages in the green spaces is pleasant, too. Sometimes it’s quite imposing, it’s not always a pretty and cheery sight, but it’s always beautiful.
When I don’t have music or podcasts playing, I feel like I can appreciate those sights a bit more. Picking up on snippets of other people’s lives is interesting, and I find my mood is easier regulated when I just ground myself in the world around me rather than disappearing up into my head with the podcast or music playing. If I have sound on that I focus on, I’ll often not really remember my walking to and from work, but if I’m just experiencing the world, I’ll usually find something memorable. I find that slowing down and taking the time away from tech has been nice for me, sometimes.