Why I'm Deliberately Losing My Headphones
Living Happy
One day this week, I was heading into town and watching a woman in amazingly colorful tights and a straw hat move a very full, very white garbage bag from the middle of the sidewalk and into the corner of an empty lot in the knee-high weeds.
But before she did that, she looked around, confused, eyes wide.
She bent and lifted that garbage bag and nestled it into the weeds like it was something precious, something she needed to be careful.
When I got to her, she’d started walking again, so she was a few feet away from the trash bag nestled in the weeds.
“Did you just move that trash bag?” I asked.
“Yes!” She looked imploringly at me and spoke in a British accent. “I didn’t know what to do. It’s . . . There are no bins anywhere.”
“No! You did the right thing,” I said.
“But it’s just there.” She waved her hand back at the bag.
I told her that I was walking to meet my daughter, but I wouldn’t be long and I’d grab the garbage and put it in our rubbish bin because I lived just down the street.
“That’s very sweet of you,” she said.
“Um, no. It’s very sweet of you to move it off the sidewalk and to care.”
That was basically it. A tiny interaction that seems to have nothing to do with head phones.
Here’s the thing: I’m an introvert.
There’s no getting around that. I recharge by being alone. The problem is that I have a family that I adore: the husband works from home, the youngest child can’t go to regular school, and I am never ever alone. So, when I leave the house and walk into our adorable tourist town, which is 5,000 strong in the winter and tourist millions, I tend to put my headphones in.
I do the same thing on airplanes.
Or at the gym when I used to go to the gym. Cough. Gyms are sort of a dream now for me.
Here is the other thing though: Headphones keep other people out and keep me immersed in whatever sick beats I’m into at the moment, but they are keeping people out while immersing me into something really cool and beautiful. I listen to music across a lot of genres, so it really is kind of immersive. When I walk and I’m feeling scared, I listen to some confident beats. When I’m trying to write a big, beautiful poignant scene in my novel, I’ll listen to some Ennio Morricone. When I work out, I listen to certain songs with distinct beats-per-minute to keep me running.
Music is my thing. It’s always been my favorite thing more than writing or art.
And it’s a secret. Nobody knows that I went to music camp, that I sang in a song-and-dance troupe with comedian Sarah Silverman and the first touring Annie!, Bridget Walsh, that I was actually paid money to sing during high school and before. That despite my weird Muppet voice, I’m a contra-alto. Nobody knows that my grandfather was a professional jazz drummer.
Headphones have been my best friends for a very long time, but they aren’t necessarily a good friend.
Tim Denning just wrote about his own experience with tinnitus, with sound, with being immersed in it, and how headphones played a big part.
He wrote, “Headphones have a speaker in each side. This speaker is right up against your ear drum. It’s closer than any other noise source. Is it any wonder that a speaker that close to an ear drum all day is going to hurt it? Headphones have a speaker in each side. This speaker is right up against your ear drum. It’s closer than any other noise source. Is it any wonder that a speaker that close to an ear drum all day is going to hurt it?”
It's more than that though, and this harkens back to my introversion. Denning writes, “Headphones are rude.”
And he’s right.
Headphones are meant to make me unapproachable, but one of my super powers is that I’m actually ridiculously approachable. That means when I don’t have headphones on, strangers talk to me. I hear their stories. I get to learn. I get to connect in ways that humans are supposed to connect.
That day that I met the sweet British lady and the garbage bag, I couldn’t find my headphones before I headed out and I was running late. A block after the British lady, there was a lovely man getting ready to get into his car. He stopped, looked up at me, and moved to the back of his car when I approached.
“Oh,” I said. “You didn’t need to do that.”
“Oh course I did,” he said.
“Did you move out of the way because you didn’t want to block my way when you opened your car door?” I asked him.
“Yes,” he said in a beautiful Jamaican accent. “I wanted to give you room.”
“That’s so kind of you.”
He smiled. “It is the least a person can do for another person.”
That’s it, right? The least a person can do for another person is take off their headphones sometimes, to think about another person, to acknowledge how cool they are, that they did a kindness, and that the kindness had an impact.
That’s why my headphones are staying off for a while, not just because it protects my hearing, but because it also protects my soul.
A QUICK DISCLAIMER
Also, I know some people really need their headphones on because of how they think and work and process and this in no way means that they shouldn’t. Someone I love is like that. I wouldn’t ever expect them to take their headphones off and I don’t expect you to either! You get to do you and be you. I’m just talking about what it is to be me.