Long afterward, I came upon it again…
Wednesday, June 30th, 2010There’s no good way to come back to a blog left derelict. But in my opinion, one of the worst ways is to do a long “I’m back” post, explaining a dedication to a new work ethic or a new approach to blogging or whatever. It offers nothing, and seems too…self-important. (And this is writing as someone who’s written such posts in the past.) And so, none of that. Just this:
I’m back.
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Unemployment is a strange world to find oneself in. I’m never entirely sure what to do on any given day. Should I fill my time with household projects? Non-stop resume tweaking and job hunting? Learning new skills? Getting out, seeing people, and doing things? And then there’s that House marathon on Sleuth — it’s not going to watch itself, y’know.
It’s a good study in discipline, at any rate. When it’s so easy to get lost in distractions, or to mire yourself in one thing to the detriment of others, with no one but yourself to keep you on task, you have to make sure you’re your own taskmaster and that the things that need doing get done. I’ll admit, I’m still figuring that one out. It’s hard getting the right mix down. But I’m working on it.
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I’ve been thinking recently about the value of silence.
My constant companion these past few weeks has been music (as can be borne out by my Facebook updates, which have been remarkably music-centric lately). Occasionally the radio, or Pandora, or maybe MTV (yes, they still play videos if you know where to look), but mostly iTunes. With nearly 23,000 songs in the ol’ library, I’m pretty much guaranteed to always be able to have something on that’ll suit my mood.
Having my music playing is great: it keeps things fun and lively while I’m in the office, and I can unearth forgotten gems or songs I didn’t know I had in my iTunes catalog. But there’s a drawback. It’s easier to zone out when there’s music playing. It becomes the focus of the front of your mind, and then everything else becomes background to it. It makes surfing the web a little easier when that activity has a soundtrack. It allows you to decide, “Hey, I like this song,” and then take a few minutes out to just listen to it, or maybe to sing along. These are, none of these things, bad, but they do undermine that discipline I talk about above.
And so: silence.
It’s easy to fill spaces with sound. When we do that, we don’t have to think; we don’t have to look inside. But silence invites us to do that. It can be a scary prospect, but also a good thing, looking inside in silence. And sometimes, it can just be the motivation we need to do something we otherwise might not do. Write a blog post, for instance, that brings a blog back from the dead.
Yup, I may have to give this “silence” thing a fair try.
