Distractions

Sometimes I just like to sit in front of the computer and listen to music on my headphones. This brings to mind a number of things... one of which is the feeling of getting lost in the music and having the world become something ethereal, unreal, far away and unimportant. Here I sit on a Sunday morning listening to a collection of Alicia Keys tracks that I've collected over the last several days. Lost in the sounds that, with headphones, seem to be inside my head...

One of the other thoughts that crops up is the similar feeling that talking on a cell phone in the car produces. Your (well, mine anyway) concentration is caught up in the conversation in a way that chatting with a passenger does not. This doesn't happen with the radio/CD player in the car so much.

When I was in my teens, I spent a week in a traffic school as a result of getting a ticket (see here). I don't remember a lot of that school but I remember one thing fairly well. The instructor mentioned that two of the worst things ever put in automobiles were radios and air conditioning.

Both cause drivers to become less aware of what is going on around them. The instructor was speaking from his perspective as a police officer. He felt the closed windows (because of the AC) and radio (which fills the car with sound and masks outside noise) made people less aware of his lights and siren. I began to realize he was right and that the problem was much larger than just being unaware of a screaming, flashing, police car coming up behind. It also made one less aware, less conscious, of much less important seeming things. The bicycle entering the roadway from the right, the motorcycle passing you close on the left, the car approaching the stop sign on a side road too quickly, and so much more.

Distractions like music and phone conversations (even "hands-free" ones) pull you into them and the world starts to fade outside that little bubble of sound and thought.

My brother introduced me to meditation when I was about 12. He came home one day with stories about how you can make the world disappear into a gray fog. He put a small dot on the wall at about eye level as I sat on the floor and told me to focus on the dot, concentrate on that dot to the exclusion of all else. I did... and, soon, the world around me became less and less real. I was brought back to something I used to experience at the dentist's office as I succumbed to the nitrous oxide ("laughing gas").

In the dentist chair, the nitrous oxide would cause the world to dissolve into a gray, swirling, cloud sometimes filled with various faces, sometimes empty... leaving me oblivious and peaceful. Until the drill got too close to a nerve, of course, and then the world was there again. Real... important... painful.

Like the car that slams into you as it rolls through that stop sign on your right, seemingly out of nowhere.