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Silence and distraction

I feel that one of the main sources of persisting emotional pain in our world is the ease with which people can distract themselves, and the following lack of sustained silence in at least most Americans lives.

Just as you can go decades never sitting on the ground, you can also go decades never being in silence.  People turn their TV’s on first thing in the morning, listen to the radio all day even at work, and of course in their cars, some home to TV, and fall asleep watching it.

Now, I think most people go for walks from time to time, but even there, they are with people.  They talk.

There is something about both sustained solitude and silence which is cathartic.  I think this is the word.  It brings up latent conflicts, pains, residual emotional scars, and what I have found is that in the feeling of them, they slowly diminish.  They resolve themselves.  They perhaps do not disappear, but become largely irrelevant to your life. You develop a solid, stable base, at the core of your personality, which is comforting.  “Life” becomes bearable.  You become philosophical in a good way.

The opposite is running from these things, which are simply asking to be completed, run through, checked off as done.  You can spend your life fearing the contents of your inner psyche.  And it will never grant you a moment of true inner peace if you do.