Hearing

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Hearing
              If there was something I could not live without is my hearing. I could not imagine watching a movie with only closed caption to guide me through the character’s life, hitting the play button on my favorite Spotify playlist and have nothing but the vibrations to grasp upon, or even being asleep in my bed and not be able to wake up to the artificial bird noises that I have programmed my phone to emit at certain hours of the morning. How could I even understand how life would be without sounds like: the shuffling of cards, a vacuum picking up a bunch of crumbs, and my very favorite. The tone that a GameCube makes when you first turn it on.

              I can honestly say that I admire people that live on without their hearing. There is no way that I could be satisfied with my life deprived of the life’s beautiful miracle of sounds and noises entering my head. The thing the people need to understand about how I perceive hearing is that if I did not have it when I was ten years of age I would not be here writing this blog post. When I was ten years old my family and I went to vacation in south America. My whole family loves traveling so we were all very excited about this trip. First, we went to Chile and that is when, if it wasn’t for my hearing, my life would have been taken away from me. We were hiking through Cerro del Muerto which I now find extremely ironic since the English translation would be “Hill of the Dead.” As we were walking, me and my Brother decided to get of trail. Everything was going fine until I stepped on a kind of animal trap. The trap consisted of a pressure plate that, when pressed and released would ignite a dart gun with tranquilizers strong enough to kill a ten-year-old boy. As soon as I stepped on the plate I heard the strange noise and immediately stopped myself from taking another step. Since I hadn’t moved the gun was not ignited and the tour trail guide was able to safely disarm the trap and save my life. So, I say this again. To me, hearing has been a life saver.

Comments

  1. ShawnMay 3, 2018 at 7:05 AM

    Wow! What a crazy story! I've never heard of a tranquilizer trap before, do you know what they were trying to catch?

    I'm going to approach my personal experience this from the other side -- as someone who used their sense of hearing the LEAST during most of their childhood.

    All the way through High School I never listened to music, rarely appreciated the sounds around me, and on the odd day I sometimes listened to other people. I had an ability to tune things out at will. Taking sounds and muffling them to background noise. I think it's because as a kid I lived right next to an airport and Boeing's construction site that I learned very quickly how to tune out noises.

    The Sound of Silence

    When you tune out sound, and all you have is silence -- I feel like a lot of people go to inner personal thoughts. You self reflect, think upon goals, stresses, and honestly analyze how you are. I spent a lot of time in my own head. When you talk to yourself, are you hearing actually hearing sound? Sure, your ears is a receptor in sound waves, but it's your brain that does that actual analyzing of the sounds. Are the sounds conjured in ones mind really that different than the sound-wave receptors being read by your brain? I can hear myself talk in my head and I can hear birds chirping if I imagine them or a firework going off. Are the sounds of memories not actual sounds?

    Just some questions that your blog post brought up for me!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausMay 4, 2018 at 9:13 AM

    Wow, to both your posts.

    ReplyDelete

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