De-stimming the walk

Recently, I was skimming through Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s waste books when I stumbled upon an interesting entry:

“There are quite a few people who read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.”

Amid Lichtenberg’s usual contemplative preoccupations of Kantian metaphysics, language, mathematics, science and epistemology, I immediately winced at this short sentiment. Something about it being ‘too close to home’, although I remain mindful of this habit. Yet, Lichtenberg’s words lingered as time went on.

I contemplated the obvious: how we sometimes consciously do things to distract our thoughts. My own then extended to Lichtenberg’s example of reading, a commonplace hobby of the time, as a means of avoiding a wandering mind.

When I think of reading in Lichtenberg’s context, one is alone. In a ritualistic manner there is an intention to read a specific book in a specific, ideally quiet, setting. The mind may wander, but it remains focused enough to absorb the book’s information and continue reading. In this vein, reading still constitutes an activity.

Afterward, I thought about today’s purported postmodern age, where the explosion of choice available to consumers, the innumerable avenues to capriciously stimulate the mind, only ever increase. Sure, I could make some analogy to the role of the modern mobile phone here, but this would be too rudimentary. So I will consider another example instead.

Mr J C. Koss did the world a tremendous favour when he revolutionised listening with the Koss SP-3 in 1958. Hitherto, we had personal listening through stereo headphones. Whilst the gramophone’s allure remained you sometimes, rightfully, wanted to listen to a tune by yourself. Over time, the capabilities and capacities of the stereo headphone expanded, becoming more and more beneficial to everyday life. I mean, those moments where you’d be walking somewhere, alone, with only the everyday, arbitrary ambience or the monologue of the mind? Well, now you could ‘lock in’. Close the world off. Have whatever sounds you wish fed directly in your ears – plus, you’d likely not be bored on account of your monthly Spotify subscription either.

But how about that moment of silence?

See, headphones are a utility. They aren’t necessarily an end, like a book is, but a means. Listening through headphones doesn’t require the same, minimal attention any form of reading does. Listening can require attention, but it doesn’t always have to. As headphones represent a means, they are therefore a possibility; a possibility of all the things you could listen to (by yourself). In this sense, listening can just as much become a mindless endeavour, whether consciously or not.

Here we have, what I believe to be, the axiom of the age: “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should”. Okay. Don’t take this too literally. Enjoy your music, enjoy your podcast. But, in a simple manner, one may say these things are to be enjoyed in their own time. In The Bed of Procrustes, Nicholas Nassim Taleb summarised this aptly: “If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and please don’t listen to music.” Otherwise, what is the end – spending every waking moment engaged by some form of sensory stimulation, unable to inevitably return to the mind?

In the 1990s, the iconography of the grey office box became synonymous as a cultural motif for the alienation found across late-stage capitalism. Sometimes I see headphones in a similar way. Everyone is locked off from the real world in a world of their own, except this form of individuation is marketed as something wonderful. But headphones don’t have to be this. Instead, they can be utilised in their own intervals.

This is where I think back to that boring walk, alone, to and fro an activity or event. What I see is an opportunity for the mind to breathe and think to itself. I’m not advocating the wandering thinker here – Darwin’s Sandwalk, Nietzsche’s hikes on the French Riviera – but some conscious nuance toward moments such as these.

Indeed, for I can attest in those times where I’ve been walking, listening and stressing, the conscious decision to take my headphones off for the remainder of my walk has helped my mind calm down. On occasion we feel the need to escape our wandering thoughts, this I concede, but it was Seneca who also wrote that no matter how far one travels, an uneasy mind will always make port. I’m not arguing such walks are an end in themselves, but, the blocking of thoughts through sensory overload achieves even less.

Alternatively, by disengaging from headphones in moments like these, one can also find moments to engage the world’s beauty, or even a tap for creative inspiration. Would the Impressionists have captured life in the same vein if their ears were blocked from those same very arbitrary ambiances? Could Proust have conceptualised the linkage of memory, place and time without those walks where he was engaged, thinking, taking in the everyday?

Everything must have its own place. Yet, there is a time for anything - not everything.