Reflections on Ignorance-Silence and Noise

     I enjoy listening to music, specifically country and EDM. Surely an eclectic combination, but I think together they can accommodate a wide variety of circumstances and moods. I listen to music in the car, while I'm studying, and when I'm in the gym. However, I saw a video the other day that is starting to make me reevaluate some of my listening habits. 

    The video talked about the importance of silence. Silence is not something entirely foreign to me given my specific practices in prayer, but in a deeper, more essential way I am alienated from silence. One of my biggest motivations in life is the pursuit of pleasure and comfort. This I cannot deny, and although that it is not inherently bad to seek either pleasure or comfort, it can certainly become a disordered desire. For example, at certain times I am overwhelmed by school, and so my first instinct is to find refuge in the "noise" of YouTube, Clash of Clans, or music. It is not physical noise itself that is bad either, but the sort of "spiritual" noise that these things create. 

    These places of comfort are actually a means for escape. The pressing silence of duty, obligation, and growth are accompanied by a certain discomfort, and these various forms of media keep the silence at bay. When I am driving and I know I should pray my rosary, or when I am playing Clash of Clans instead of doing homework, I drown out the silence through noise. For me, this figurative silence is much louder than the physical noise. I think this is the point the video was trying to make. So often we can look to escape the discomfort brought by reality through various forms of noise. The only bad thing is that genuine goodness lies in and beyond this discomfort, and the noise only prevents us from encountering that good. 

    Here, yet again, my ignorance is revealed. I want to be coddled by the noise instead of embracing what is real. Certainly the noises exist in reality, but another YouTube short or game of Clash of Clans is not "real" in the fullest sense. Neither of those things draw me into what is good, true, or beautiful. That is not to say that those things cannot achieve that end, but I think it is good to practice a sort of withdrawal in order to reevaluate how attached we are to the noise. I don't think the individual in the video was condemning these things wholesale, but it is a part of the virtue of prudence to step back and detox from what we are so accustomed to. 

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