Ah, Christmas. A day of joy and celebration as the hearts of men and women are filled with good cheer as they spend time with their families and friends.
Well, some people celebrate the day like that. For me, it's more of a "Lonely Guy" Christmas. Ann went home to celebrate with her family and I chose to stay here with Zelda (our American cocker spaniel) and the plants. Since everyone else has plans to be with their families, I'm kind of on my own.
I'm probably making this sound sad and/or pathetic, but that's not really the case. As I wrote in my last entry, I'm not really a Christmas person. And since the day doesn't hold a lot of intrinsic meaning or value for me, I approach it as an opportunity to try new things while the rest of the world is quietly busy. I just have to make sure I do my grocery shopping in advance so I don't really need anything.
This year, I thought I'd take a vow of silence. Since I didn't have any plans to get together with anyone, I thought I'd see what it was like to go for 24 hours without speaking. I figured all I really had to do was not answer the phone for the day. I didn't have a particular agenda; it was just an exploration of how talking fits into my life and daily routine. So I stopped talking - or, rather, started trying to not talk - at midnight on Christmas Eve.
So how did it go? OK, for the most part. But I found out I talk to myself more than I thought I did. Not a lot, just little snatches of a song that's in my head or small bits of my internal monologue if I'm thinking about something (like solving a Tanga puzzle - http://www.tanga.com/dailyfun - or composing an email). I would also sometimes inadvertently speak to Zelda (such as "shh, Zelda" when she went on a barking spree). The lack of purity of absolute silence mildly annoyed me, but I didn't really feel like giving myself a hard time.
When I took Zelda out for a walk, there were large gangs of people strolling about - families walking off their Christmas dinners, I suspect. I had to kind of hustle and dodge to avoid the possibility of someone trying to strike up a conversation with me.
The real test was when I decided I wanted to get a newspaper. I had read that some cities have Boxing Days sales and I wanted to see if there were any advertisements in Brisbane's paper. This meant I was going out in public to conduct a transaction. I wrote up a message explaining that I was taking a vow of silence for the day, in case I got into an awkward situation. It turned out I didn't need it. I was able to get everything done by smiling and handing over my money. (There were no special, big sales, by the way. Several stores were starting sales, but they were nothing out of the ordinary and they were going to run for several days.)
In the end, it was mildly interesting experiment that gave me a little more insight to my personality. (I'm a talkative guy; I'm sure that surprises many of you!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment