I hear voices. Well, it’s more like just one little voice. I'm sure it won't be long before I start seeing dead people.
I'm not Sybill and I don't have a split personality. And I have never had imaginary friends. I'm not sure if it's God I hear, a little angel, my Higher Self, or a voice from another dimension, but I hear something. So for the purposes of simplification, I will hereafter refer to it as “That Little Voice.
It speaks even when I don't want to hear it and louder when I try to ignore it. And I typically do until it's too late, at which point it says, “I told you so” while I’m putting ice on my head after banging it against the wall. My little voice has a caustic sense of humor, but looking back, it always seemed to know better. It told me when I shouldn’t date someone, when someone was lying, and when to turn left when I wanted to turn right.
I think we all have our own little voice and if we stop talking so much, we can hear it. It is almost drowned out in our daily distractions and information overload, but has its own determined desperation that makes it hang on. Sometimes it is polite and stays quiet until we shut up and at other times it screams out and scares us into listening.
Oh, come on. Admit it. You have all been in that situation where you know that what you are about to do or who you are about to date is just wrong. That Little Voice tells you so, but you don’t listen, do you? You do it anyway.
While sitting in a local coffee shop the other day, my little ears were ringing from the seemingly endless staccato chatter around me and I wondered why these people didn’t turn blue because they weren’t breathing between their words. As I walked out, silence was a welcome antidote.
And that’s when I usually hear That Little Voice.
It speaks between clicks on the keyboard, Tweets, and Facebook views, when I escape from the deafeningly loud music at the gym, and when that confounded barking dog in my neighborhood shuts up. I sometimes wonder if there is so much noise around us just so we don’t hear That Little Voice.
Information wins out over intuition. Distraction leads to fragmentation and disconnection and no matter how many friends I have on Facebook, they are still ghosts in the machine and I still get lonely. And sometimes I think I’m losing myself in the artificial networks and obsession with the business of others. Do I really need to know when my friends are plucking their eyebrows or if their kids won their soccer game? Do I really have the time to check email, voicemail, Tweets, and all of these entries? Sometimes my brain freezes up just like my computer does and only I can hear the silent screams of That Little Voice. So perhaps I need to detach and defrag.
Maybe our hearing starts getting worse as we get older so that we can start listening to our other voice. I remember looking in the mirror a few years ago and for a minute, I saw myself much younger. I kept doing the I-Dream-of-Jeannie blink to try to make myself stick that way. It didn’t work. But I started thinking…if an older and wiser Robyn (which might be questionable, so let's just say more experienced) could go back in time and tell this sweet, naïve girl what was going to happen, whom she would meet, why she should run the other way when she was so wildly and magnetically attracted to someone (and that technology would allow her to monitor his every move through a magic box on her desk), and how to avoid falling on her face or banging her head against the wall, would she listen? Probably not.
Would you?
That Little Voice: Good question. Let’s see how they answer it. Oh, and nice try with the Jeannie wink. Now shut off your computer, go sit under a tree, and get in touch with your heart (or is that your microprocessor?)