The Unheard Anguish of the World
How to prioritize your goals, clear your head, and find inner peace at last
Happy Halloween! Today is a double-feature: in addition to this piece, I also have a story that was published today in “The Witch House,” a magazine for cosmic horror. My story, “Open the Door,” is pretty good, but you should read the full issue mostly for all the other delightfully creepy stories. Once again, here.
It’s important that I clear my head and focus on what I need to do. I know it’s possible to obtain all my goals in life—even my wildest dreams!—if I could only set clear intentions and then remain committed to seeing my projects through to completion.
It will require me to close off all distraction.
It will require me to hold the world at arm’s length—to withstand the requests, desires, wants, and needs of everyone else in the world. I must become intimate with only myself, and my goals.
I needed to scrub my digital life clean. First, I cleared my email inbox and unsubscribed from every newsletter, blog, podcast, and marketing message. What was I going to miss? Another life update from a content creator living in California? You have no idea the kind of junk that was in there. I can only imagine the trash, the sweeping detritus of textual garbage that clutters your inbox, dear reader (this email included; you could do much worse than deleting it right now and continuing with your day). Clear it all out! Don’t stop with your email, take the shovel to your digital files, too. Do you really need to buy Apple a coffee every month just to keep everything on your phone? Unleash a cleaning frenzy that would make even Marie Kondo uncomfortable, and demolish every file, photo, pdf, meme, and video that does not spark joy. I’ve seen what some of your desktops look like. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Do you like living like this? Drowning in digital stuff. Delete everything.
You can hardly imagine the bliss of a cleaned out computer. You can even hear it hum, unencumbered by all the crap you’ve been downloading for decades. I can finally hear my computer, and I can finally hear my mind. You’ll hear it, too, that tiny voice you thought was silenced for good. You’ll see things, too, objects that aren’t there. You thought your aphantasia was a neurological quirk, but it was only a short-circuited brain clogged by all the crap on your computer. Your attention span will return, like your lost childhood dog, scratching at the door to come back in. You’ll be able to read again. You might even finish this essay.
I didn’t stop there, of course, I kept going. I turned my shovel to my task manager next. Piles and piles of stuff that I was planning to do but never finished. Never got around to it. I deleted them all. If I was going to do it, I would have done it already. I left myself with a clear plate where I could put only my highest priorities. It was time to get focused; it was time to put my energy where it mattered. It was time to focus on one thing. What was the one thing that if I accomplished would transform my life? One single, clear, beautiful, shimmering goal.
In order to focus on that goal, I needed to shut everything else out. I needed to learn to say “no” to everything. I realized I needed to clear my calendar. I declined everything that was in there—every upcoming meeting, appointment, and planned outings with friends and family—it all went in the trash and I blocked off my entire schedule. I made myself permanently unavailable. If you want to achieve big goals, you’ll have to rethink everything in your life. You’ll have to get serious about it! There is no way to book a meeting with me. There is no assistant to talk to, no way to schedule fifteen minutes for a quick touch base, no availability to grab coffee and connect. None of it was helping me reach my higher self, so it all needed to go.
It wasn’t enough just to remove everything. I needed to put barriers in place. Systems to keep me focused. I blocked all the apps on my phone. I tore all the TVs from my walls and took them to the curb. I left the holes in the plaster to remind me of my why—my all-encompassing, over-arching goal, the one thing I was put in this universe to accomplish. I decided that nobody needed to be texting me and took the SIM card out of my phone. If you need to get ahold of me, you’ll find a way. I’m not living my life based on anyone else’s requirements. I’m living my life for myself. What will I do with my one wild and precious life? Not spend it answering text messages, that’s for sure!
Everything had to change. I have serious goals, and they require serious commitment. I put up thick curtains over all my windows so I couldn’t see what was happening outside. I bought a special pair of glasses designed for the blind so that I wouldn’t have to see anything when I leave the house to get my mail. I didn’t want to get distracted by the world when I go down my driveway. The glasses block everything. None of it matters. It’s all distraction trying to keep me from my one true purpose. I don’t need the anxiety of feeling beholden to a world that is careening out of control. I can’t afford the chance that I will be knocked off course by something I see or hear in my neighborhood. I can’t take that chance. What you see is everything; the quality of your filter determines the quality your output.
There’s no need for me to go anywhere, anyway. The world is full of too much sensory detail—the sound of birds singing, the flash of green sunlight given by every single leaf in a forest of trees all shimmering in a cool breeze, the endless blue sky punctuated by an infinite expanse of fluffy white clouds, a prairie-full of flowers that go on forever, the dazzling colors of the sky as the sun slips beyond the edge of the world, the cries of distant children playing in the darkening street—all of it sets my mind to thinking about other things, about the increasingly distant (and gradually fading) memories of my childhood, about the overwhelming number of living beings with their own little mnemosyne worlds, every one of them trying to preserve that brief flash of consciousness, every one of them caught in the continuous struggle to eat, sleep, reproduce, and survive, caught in the eternal struggle to find even a sliver of rest in a cruel, meaningless world that marches ever onward, driven to a blind, purposeless beat as the death-mill of evolution grinds everything into blood, uncountable lifetimes of sense memories extinguished over and over, unendingly, until at last, with a great sigh of relief, the universe goes dark, rendering it all null and void.
These thoughts are not conducive to my goals.
I needed to keep my singular goal fixed in my mind at all times, or else the whirlwind of life will swallow me whole, as it has swallowed the unheard, nameless masses of history. I bought earplugs so that I could shut off all the noise, too. If I could find a way to block the sensation of air on my face, I would do it.
At last, in my fortress of deprivation, I found I could work. But it wasn’t long after I stepped aside from the world that I heard a loud crash against my window. It was so loud it managed to penetrate my defenses. I tried to re-focus on my work, but a second crash came a short while later and curiosity, unfortunately, got the better of me. I peeked through the blinds and saw, lying on the grass beside my house, two dead birds. They were bright blue, their red blood soaking the earth. A third bird struck my window, then another. All night I heard them, thumping against my house, throwing their little bodies into death. What has come into them? I keep all the blinds tightly shut, but I know they’re out there. I know the bodies are piling up on my stoop. A jumbled mass of feather and bone in various stages of decomposition. Fetid flesh wriggling with maggots. It’s not just the birds but people who are dying. I can hear them through my headphones, the terrible cries, the screaming. The keening chorus of hair-pulling, God-cursing lamentation. Something has gone terribly wrong. If I peek through the blinds, I see them on my doorstep, slumped and weary. Expiring. I have to step past them when I go to get my mail. I can smell their dying. I don’t dare come out of my house. I don’t dare remove my glasses or my headphones. If I do, I might see a world on fire. I might see anguish and desperation everywhere. I might hear a million voices crying for help, bloody hands reaching for assistance, the pleading, beseeching cry to do something.
I’ve figured it out. I’ve realized the error of my ways.
I was relying too much on systems, on external safeguards to help me focus. In doing so, I had neglected my most potent defense: my mind. I realized that with a little meditative trick, I could simply funnel my attention away from my surroundings. Not block it out literally—that will never work in the long-run—but simply refuse to let anything in. Drop the world from my mind as if it were an old doll tossed in the trash. I could simply not hear what I heard, not see what I saw. I closed off my mind from my sense organs. For weren’t those the source of all desire, of all unhappiness?
I no longer need my glasses or my earplugs. I have removed all the blinds from my windows. It makes no difference. I choose where to place my attention. I can go out into the world and it is as if the world is no longer there.
I choose what to see. For instance, an old man came to me asking for money for food. I chose not to see him. I chose not to see his weary, half-dead body slumped against my door. I chose not to hear him screaming in agony. Perhaps he has expired at last. He’s decomposing right beneath my window, I can see it without seeing it. There are others, too, who come to die at my doorstep. I don’t hear them because I’m focused on my goal. I don’t see them because they are distractions to my true purpose. I’m focusing on the one thing I need to do, and it’s necessary to shut everything out. It’s easy now. There are no longer piles of bodies on my door. It is easy enough to step over them as I come and go.