Too
Many Words
“Are
the words you are about to share with the world really that necessary?
Tracy
Balzer (A Journey of Sea and Stone, p.175, Broadleaf Books, 2021)
Do you
ever feel like there are too many words coming at you every day? That there is
far more talk, talk, talk, than necessary? Whatever happened to “the strong,
silent type” we all admired? Some days I am glad for every scrap of silence I
can muster, but lately I’ve gotten bad to talk to myself out loud, and to talk incessantly
to Liza, even when she’s asleep and clearly not interested in what I’m saying.
When I
go to someone’s house where the TV is on all the time, I get frayed around the
edges—especially when attempts at conversation must be made over the yakking of
commentators. It feels like we’re all determined to be heard for almost any
reason we can find—as though we must keep a thread of conversation going or something
dreadful might happen.
I spent one night in a
hotel on my way to NC for an art show and happened to turn on the TV to CNN. I
don’t have it at home, so I watched a bit. The jury in the Oath Keepers trial
had just wrapped up their verdicts for the 5 defendants. The commentators
tediously went through the results for each one. They must have said “seditious
conspiracy—that’s the most important charge—the one that carries the longest prison
sentence” one hundred times in the 15-minutes I watched. I get it; this is not
a charge we hear every day, but is it necessary to repeat the prison sentence
in every single sentence?
Something about Covid (I
blame the virus for everything) and the semi-isolation we’ve endured has rendered
us incapable of shutting our mouths. Perhaps we’ve experienced too much alone time
or been too overwhelmed by the amount of news blasting our ears off. But we
seem to have become a nation of babbling blabbermouths. (See what I mean, I
couldn’t stop myself.) Or maybe we’re all just dying for attention any way we
can get it. We suddenly have opinions on things we know nothing about, and
those opinions must be said aloud this minute or else! Doesn’t anyone ever run
out of breath?
I didn’t bring an audio
book to listen to in the car. Instead, I took the drive time to appreciate the
silence. All this noise, all these paid talkers, everything that calls itself a
“communication platform” conspires to give us a collective headache. Let’s thwart
their efforts. Turn off all devices, turn off the cell phones, sit down and
listen to the sounds of your heart and your home. Try music rather than words.
Or, better still, natural sounds. Our ears are tired, our brains are tired. We
need to retool and reboot. Most of all, we need to relax and give our tongues a
break. Sighing is allowed. Words are not.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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