Momentary Quiet Imposed

I have a certain difficulty with silence. Yesterday, one of my roommates asked that I not have a movie playing for a while while he recorded video in the living room. I guessed on my own that making noise of any other form, including music, while honoring the letter of his request, would fail to honor the spirit. I eventually decided to listen to music on headphones, but for a while I just existed in silence. I found it to be a trying experience.

I fill most of every day with noise of some kind. I listen to the radio in the shower, and I play movies or episodes of "Mystery Science Theater 3000" as I sleep, and there's lots of the same in between. Being denied the ability to do that leads me to a lot of unfettered thinking, which is not always so pleasant. I may have said this a number of times before, but it probably bears revisiting. I may have had new thoughts, improbable as that is.

I also love silence. Noises are a terrible distraction, whether they be from a roommate or neighbor's activities or the very movies and music I play (which tends to arrest my attention if it is comprehensible in any way). I love my surroundings to be entirely quiet so to that I can engage in the self-destructive practice of distracting myself. I manage to avoid unpleasant internal monologues, but I also have a hard time getting anything done. It's like being on one of those drugs.

I would like to become more at ease with silence and also better at coping with extraneous noise. Really, it would be good enough if I could get one at one condition or the other so that I could just subject myself to that one thing. If I had to pick, I guess I'd pick the noise, since silence is so much harder to come by in circumstances like I have. But then I'll definitely want to land the other one, because the time will come when I have some quiet, and I'll be glad to know how to deal with it.