The Better Silences

It’s an automatic thing, something I gravitate toward. I often find myself at a store, staring at a shelf full of Blu-Ray DVDs.

There is always a movie on sale, always something cheap enough to buy, to hold in my hand while I walk around the store, later ripping open the plastic wrapping and sticking the disc into a player, turning up the surround sound and watching something in high definition. It’s an easy, somewhat mindless, almost cathartic moment.

What I’ve been paying attention to lately is my state of mind during this process.

Am I at peace with myself when I buy a DVD?

Am I stressed out?

Do I later regret buying the DVD, realizing that it wasn’t imperative that I got it at that moment?

Is there something else that’s bugging me that I can’t resolve, and so I use the act of purchasing the DVD like others use alcohol or drugs or food to diffuse the noise of confusion?

Until recently, my answer was often yes. As the watching of movies are vehicles for escaping reality, my purchasing of movies was an overture to this escape.

I don’t know how long this is going to last, but lately I haven’t had a need to escape. I often go into a store full of DVDs and leave empty-handed. I still scrutinize the movies on display, think about the ones I’ve already seen, and wonder about the ones that I haven’t. I think about their relative importance in my life. And then I walk away, after deciding on the answer.

I find myself muting the TV more, especially during commercials. I change the channel when people start to argue on CNN, because I would like to know about news, not noise.