I'm like the Grinch in one respect. No, I don't hate the Whos. I don't hate Christmas. I don't yell at Max. But I do hate the noise, noise, noise.
Maybe I'm just getting old and cranky. I know that part of it is because I have tinnitus. If you don't know what that is, have you ever had your ears ring after a particularly loud sound or a noisy concert? If you were to have that sound in your ear(s) all the time, without relief, that's tinnitus. It can be different sounds for different people. Mine is a high-pitched shrieking sound, like a tea kettle whistle. Tinnitus is apparently supposed to make a person more sensitive to sound, and I am proof of that.
What I don't understand is that people around me seem to require sound/noise all the time. I listen to the radio, I watch TV, but there are times when I like to sit in relative silence, a thought that would make many of my co-workers recoil in terror. "Silence? How can you stand it??"
When I was growing up, nobody thought silence was bad. As a kid, I played outside without a radio to listen to or videos to watch. My family traveled to the mountains and went on long hikes where all we heard was occasional wind and the birds. I don't remember considering that torture (well, except for the tough hiking part). We might even spend an evening reading, with no sound except pages turning.
Now everybody's got to have ear buds or a radio or a phone or a TV or something. It puzzles me.
People ask me, "How do you come up with all those ideas for your novels?"
Here's the answer: silence. Almost all of my ideas come when I'm walking in nature or staring at a computer monitor, in silence. Silence lets my mind settle down, roam at will and make connections that it could never make with constant outside stimulation. It needs that breathing space to get creative.
I don't hate music or TV or whatever. These things are entertaining and have an important place in anyone's life. But don't let them rule your life.
Give yourself a break once in a while to let your mind wander. You'll be surprised by what you might come up with.
