I had a comically bad day yesterday, like dropping things, almost lost my keys down the drain on the sidewalk, spilled soup at the store near a makeup section, almost tore my pants, got back from the store only to find out I was out of TP, etc.
It was more funny than anything else, like so much random trivial bad luck in one day is like something out of some 90s Tom Hanks comedy.
But there was one thing that actually annoyed me - on my way back from the store on my grocery trip, my phone suddenly went from a healthy 7% to 0% and died. I was stuck with no music for the remainder of the walk back.
Soooo I was forced to listen to the sound of well - nothing at all basically.
Just birds chirping, wind blowing, leaves rustling, all as I walked the same path I walk all the time and see the same things I’ve seen hundreds of times, just waiting to get home.
Don’t get me wrong I love where I live and everything, it’s a really cool city with good pedestrian infrastructure, I almost never even get close to a car and it’s not some smelly euro village either, but seeing the same things I’ve already seen and having no stimuli at all, it wasn’t that big a deal but it was unpleasant.
That got me thinking - I sometimes see folks not wearing earphones outside, and I’ve heard on more than one occasion from some acquaintances that they don’t listen to music outside, and I wonder - why’s that?
Why would you choose to do that?
And, what do y’all like, do, exactly? How do you deal with the monotony of your grocery trips or things like that when you don’t even have music on? Do you just never get bored of walking the same roads/neighborhoods w/e day after day?
Tell me, on the street after the second corner you turn on the way to the store, how many trees are there along the sidewalk? What kind of trees are they?
There’s an interesting book called “On Looking” where the author walked around a city block with 11 experts in different fields and saw the world through their eyes. Here’s an article about it: https://www.themarginalian.org/2013/08/12/on-looking-eleven-walks-with-expert-eyes/
The world is endlessly interesting, even in the mundane. Even if it’s just keeping an eye out for new street art or thinking about a project or figuring out what I will do this weekend or just listening to my body and feeling the new aches or am old pain going away. There’s often not a need for music for me.
Depends on the specific path, but there are 4-6 trees, planted in the middle of a small parking lot in front of an office building. I’m no tree specialist, so Idk, they’re just fairly normal common kind of trees.
There is a lot more around the corner itself and they were a delightful shade of gold a few weeks back, to the point at certain angles they’d actually do that ray tracing thing of bleeding colour onto the concrete paths, I was tired from work that week and because of how dark it got I never got the chance to take my DSLR out and take some shots at mid-day, contrasted with a cloudless blue sky it would be quite beautiful, but oh well.
I agree with all of this except the last part, because if anything all of this is enhanced by music for me.