Distractive Listening

Walking around my college campus, for what will be my last year, I've noticed a few things that might have slipped my notice in years passed. For example, I've always been aware of how students and others walking around the city walk with their headphones or earbuds on, listening to music as they walk from place to place. However, I've not stopped to think about this new tendency until today.

I passed a friend of mine today, who was listening to her music, smiling distantly, and even bobbing her head a bit to the music. I waved and called her name, but she couldn't hear me. I laughed it off as we always do, but I couldn't shake the sense that this picture of extreme individualism was more than just a society-wide affinity for good tunes.

Why is it that we are so apt to slide on the headphones and turn on the iPod as we walk crowded streets? Why do we want to cover up the sounds our surroundings with music? Just walking back to my apartment after passing my friend, I was so much more aware of the sounds of my city: people talking, tourists, the sound of cars and footsteps and hoof-beats from carriage tours. Maybe I wouldn't have noticed the wind whistling through the changing leaves and my hair.

Even when jogging or working out, the first thing we do is put in headphones, to watch the TV perched on the  edge of the treadmill or to listen to our favorite playlists as we run a capricious path between buildings and patches of grass. Why is that? Do we not want to hear our own labored breaths or the sounds of our own feet pounding against the ground? Would we rather focus on the beat of the music than the beat of our hearts? Why the distraction?

Perhaps, instead, it is a ploy to keep our privacy. When you walk or jog down the street with buds in your ears, you are less likely to hear someone call your name, or call for help. If you're waiting at the corner for the light to change, a stranger is not going to strike up a casual conversation with you once they see the headphones. The tiny white buds are a great wall.

I wonder if this isn't some grand metaphor playing out before our eyes; so many people among us are walking through life with buds in their ears, listening only to what they want to hear--not hearing heir own labored breaths and racing heart and pounding footsteps as they jog, a reminder of their fragile grasp on life, of impending mortality. Maybe none of us want to hear ourselves running because we'd have to then acknowledge from what we are fleeing. So many people around us, waiting on the light to change, have in the ear buds, not wanting you to start a conversation with them outside of their convenience, not hearing the Voice calling their name.

Or maybe we are the ones with the headphones on. Maybe we don't want to acknowledge our surroundings, hear the cries for help, or even hear the sounds of city and nature. "In the world, and not of it," we might say to ourselves as we jog, taking Words out of context as we are so apt to do and running, running from the faces and stories and waving arms, not waving but drowning. And it's all too easy to say we didn't hear, but the truth of it all is we fail to listen.