It seems common enough. Get in the car, start the motor, adjust the air conditioner to be the yin against mother nature’s yan, then you turn on the radio to combat the silence.
If you can’t tell from the title of this bit of copy, I am suggesting a change to this almost automatic process. Break the muscle memory and, at least on occasion, skip the radio.
Why?
I did this the other day for what might have been my first time. I was swapping car stereos in my white with blue-stripes cop caller. I didn’t right away have all that was needed to install the new radio. I thought, how horrible! I won’t have my music to remove my mind from the excitement of the daily drive.
The thing was, that during the next morning’s drive, I was able to mentally go places that I didn’t usually go. I went to the future! Really. I realized that when listening to music, I went to the past. I went to places and ideas that the music reminded me of (for obvious reasons, it doesn’t remind me of the future). Places and people I was with when I first heard a given song. When I heard a new song, the best I could get to was the present. New associations for me to recall when next I heard this song if both it and my current circumstances were indeed memorable.
So, the radio = the past. Although we certainly can’t afford to forget it, we needn’t often dwell there. While the future is a place we will never know, it makes sense to at least give it some time in our minds.
Silence is the mind’s playground. Silence = the future.
