Day 28: Silence

Is it weird that two of my favourite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer are (1) the episode in which nobody can talk and (2) the episode in which everybody sings?

I just watched the former, and oddly it spoke volumes to me. I wondered about silence, about how we would communicate if we couldn't talk to each other. Go one further and eliminate electronic communication. The written word in printed (or handwritten) format would be our primary means of conveying messages to one another, not just over long distances, but in face-to-face interactions.

That is, of course, if we survive that long without the sounds of our voices in our ears. The show demonstrated a city-wide depression, aggression and numbness from the loss of voices, and I'm not sure how long society would last in the 21st century without electronic communication on top of that silence. (I'm taking that into consideration because the show was set in the 90s, and email wasn't that big a feature of regular life for most people in Sunnydale.)

It's interesting, of course, because we live in an era in which fewer people are writing to each other, and while we encourage people to talk about their feelings, few actually do. Imagine if they couldn't, literally speaking. If people couldn't voice their opinions, how would that change them? Would we all become mindless, or would we be more willing to read what those around have written? Would violence be the first response to anger, rather than a last resort?

I suppose right now, I'm considering this on an emotional level, too. For the first time in a week or so, I haven't felt like I was under any undue pressure. I don't have the book to worry about, I don't have to be concerned about meeting a word count. I can relax. I could relax. And I did. I suppose I still am. I got to eat breakfast with my family and know that the only thing I had to do was get ready for work afterwards. I could eat dinner when I returned home, and afterwards relax on my bed, and then go to watch Buffy with a cup of tea and an ice-cream (I'm not sure they're a pairing that usually go together, ice-cream and tea, but they seemed to work well.)

All in all, the emotional silence of the day was a relief.

To be fair, I did it to myself. No one said I had to write three books in a month. No one forced me to only focus on those books. On top of that, no one has done or said anything wrong to me that might get me unduly upset. All of the emotional noise of the past week has been brought on upon me by myself and my own decisions, and the pressure I applied on myself.

It felt good to get a break from that.

Tomorrow, since I don't appear to have any other plans, I think I'm going to do my Big Bad Poetry Day. It could be fun, it could be productive, and writing poetry has always helped me to deal with whatever's on my mind. Tomorrow, of course, it won't just be a twelve hour catharsis session. I'll probably write poems about nature and friendship and all the usual things people write poetry about. But I have ideas to experiment with, and I'm going in with one goal in mind: to have fun.