Thoughts after the road...

Beautiful drive back from LaCrosse yesterday with plenty of sunshine, unseasonably warm weather, and little traffic now that the tourists have gone away for a while. The photo on the left is "Grandad Bluff" which is directly to the east of downtown LaCrosse, and the right is a view of downtown. The road back looks a lot like the bluffs you see on the left and only stops being that scenic at Red Wing, MN, on the edge of the Twin Cities Metro.

But that's not the story, the quiet is.

I normally have the radio on for the journey but this time decided not to use it at all but rather be alone with my thoughts as the miles passed. It worked out for the most part, at least for a while, and then the craving for the noise, the stimulation, set it. "Just push the button and find out what the Packer's score is..." "How about some music?" All these thoughts going through my head and I realized how much of a noise junkie I really was.

Silence can be frightening because there's no place to hide, nothing but you and your thoughts, and then what? I realized that much of what I consider "thought" may in fact be noise, outside stimuli that have been put into my head and which I think are my own thoughts. There are parts of me that may not be me at all but rather artificial constructs that have grown in place to the point where I assume they are, in fact, real.

Ouch, or rather yikes!