9:00AM
When the chatter in the brain stops, it can be so quiet outside. I sit here and soak in the silence. I find it amazing how it is almost always this silent and yet I have so many thoughts running through my head that it rarely seems as so.
Actually, I don’t think the thoughts run through my head so much as they are subvocalization that are emitted from my voice box or larynx and then somehow heard by my ears. I’m not really sure the biomechanics of it, but I imagine it is just like speaking out loud but more quietly. Like reading in our head where we enunciate every word.
I had a colleague back at the University of Illinois who created a device to attach to someone’s throat to be able to conduct a “silent” phone call. With the device strapped around your throat, you could call someone else and transmit messages without saying anything out loud. I think it worked by reading the electrical signals or the muscle signals somehow. I thought it was pure magic.
So when I think about this and assume that the voices in my head are from me actually speaking, sometimes I just try to relax my throat and focus on the sounds around me. If I try to hear the birds singing outside, the sump pump draining, the water trickling, the refrigerator kicking on, the air being breathed in and out of my body, it makes it harder to speak at the same time. Or I’ll just focus on trying to keep my throat as still as possible so that I don’t use the muscles at all. Trying to stop speaking.
I don’t know if any of these things are the perfect solution and really, I don’t believe there are any perfect solutions, no matter how hard I try to find them. Yesterday, I watched a video with Yuval Noah Harari, a historian who wrote Sapiens and Homo Deus, and he advised students to follow the big questions that keep them excited in life. I felt so much more free after hearing that: it’s not about having one specific answer, it’s about exploring and trying to answer a specific question.
Speaking of listening to sounds, the shower just started because my mom has to go to radiation today and a part of me feels annoyed that she took a shower and yet, even though I’ve told them that I’m working on this project, I didn’t specifically tell them I will audio record at the same time every day.
I wonder if sometimes paying too much attention to the environment makes us feel too much. For example, I’m feeling my chest tighten, breath shorten, and my frustration increasing. I feel my eyebrows furrow and a lot more.
I think sometimes I’m afraid to feel the full range of emotions we feel in life.
9:10AM
