Been trying to do stints, timed spurts, of total silence throughout my work days. It’s a constant back and forth, music or silence. But I tend to feel calmer, better about myself somehow, after I manage to be silent awhile.
I've been growing into this recently. Learning to be okay with no inputs and no outputs. Eliminate distractions. Step away from the stress. Just for a few minutes at a time several intentional times throughout the day. Now I'm finding it bleeds into the regular parts of my day — waiting in life for something, walking into a crowded room, even a lull in conversation — the inner silence surfaces for just a moment. I'm definitely a beginner in this space.
I usually have headphones on all the time but recently I started doing my morning routine and walking outside without them, and it’s so peaceful. Sometimes your nervous system just needs nothing at all lol.
You know that window of a few minutes right when you wake up in the morning where your thoughts haven’t all loaded yet? These days I enjoy silence as a more affecting thing than a lack of stimulus. Like it’s not the absence of noise, it’s the presence of quiet. And it feels nice on your ears if you tune in.
I don’t know how people read without candles. I’ll read without a candle—in the daytime, at the park, on the train. I do do that. But when I’m really going in. That’s the only way. At night, phone silented and out of reach. Reading for the duration of a candle’s burn. Thing is, in order to really use a candle, you’ve gotta have candles on candles. You’ve gotta be really strapped. Solid holder, with the wide, ashtray-like base, so you can balance it on random things. An armrest. Your lap. I throw down on these 45-count boxes of “perfect flame, clean burning, cotton wick” bistro candles from Bolsius. Polish brand. But you don’t even have to ball out like that, you can just go with the 4-count taper pack. Just make sure you got that solid holder, that’s crucial.
Recently bodied this. Old big French novel. Technically about the mining strikes in northern France in 1866, and definitely about that, but also just about life during that time. Scrapping in the mines. Living in close quarters, turning up in the village with the other workers. The implied stuff Zola looks at in terms of family structure, mating rules, social life. It moves like novels of that time, like the Russians, say, in how it roams omnisciently in that quintessentially 19th century way. But something about how he starts it, with the protagonist pulling up to a new town, homeless and hungry, and seeing him gradually integrate into the mining community… The intimacy of living in such close quarters… Idk, it’s counterintuitively spicy, I recommend it, it slaps.
I don’t know what it is about leaks and snippets that make em more compelling; maybe it’s that, even with artists on the biggest scale, there’s a long process of revision and re-recording that happens. And it’s creatively invigorating to remind myself of that. I’m talking about Ye, mostly (but could be talking about Carti, Uzi). The Jesus is King-era alternate tape Yahndi that leaked, from when it was still called Yahndi, I’ll still bump that. But more recently, this alternate Donda-era tracklist someone put together, “God’s Country.” It’s this weird, slightly illicit collaboration that happens between fan, artist, and listener. It keeps some of the tracks and sketches Ye made, then scrapped, alive. I like that.