I love good humor. I love a perfectly delivered punch line packaged with impeccable comedic timing. To deliver good humor with an unmovable poker face is nothing short of an art form. However, it takes a great bit of self-awareness and an even better sense of humor to get the joke when it’s on you.
I also love music. As a musician, listening to music is very important to me. One of my greatest pleasures is to make a listening pod of my car and take in an entire album as I'm driving around town. I love to digest an album over the course of a couple of days or weeks, listening to it on repeat, hearing the way the songs relate to each other, picking up on the lyrical or musical themes, and discerning the overall character of the piece. If I listen closely I might even hear musical jokes.
One of my other guilty pleasures is listening to podcasts. I guess I like to overhear other people’s conversations.
Many years ago, well before the days of bluetooth and Airpods, when my car radio/CD player was my primary means of listening to music, I was on my way to teach an early morning yoga class when I opened my car door only to discover that someone had broken into my car and had stolen my car stereo.
I was devastated.
My car was locked, there were no broken windows, and by its appearance, the door didn't look forced open. Judging by the dexterity, skill, and ease of this job, the guy who robbed me seemed likely to be a neurosurgeon during the day and probably stole car stereos as a hobby during the evenings. Normally, when people steal your car stereo, the damage they incur trying to extricate your stereo, exponentially outweighs the value of the stereo itself. Fortunately, this guy was extremely thorough and created no other damage to the car other than a gaping, stereo-sized hole in my dashboard with a few neat wires sticking out like exposed nerves from a severed limb. In fact, the job was so neat, that I half expected to see the wires twisted off, taped, and labeled for me.
The only sloppy part of the entire job—the part that truly added insult to injury—was the fact that while so expertly absconding with my stereo, the thief was apparently so skilled at stereo theft that as he tore out my car stereo with one hand, he held an ice cream bar in the other. Stereo extracted, job done, ice cream bar finished, he wadded up his ice cream wrapper and unceremoniously tossed it on the passenger seat before slinking out into the inky darkness of the night. The Pink Panther leaves a single white glove— this guy leaves an ice cream wrapper.
Surveying the loss, I picked up said wrapper and, fuming, was about to throw it away when I noticed its label. In nauseatingly bright and happy colors it read, "I Love Good Humor." I was too pissed off to appreciate the irony of this sickly sweet joke a the moment, however, I sensed that somehow, there may be some rich lesson in this gooey message and instead of throwing the wrapper away, I placed the it in the now vacant cavity in my dashboard that until very recently had housed my stereo, and drove away brooding.
As I sped down the street, it was like my arm had its own central intelligence, much the way an octopus’ arm does, for no sooner did I start to drive away than my arm, by complete and mindless habit, reached over and attempted to turn on my stereo, only to nudge the wrapper sitting in the stereo's empty and gaping socket. I looked over to see what gooey mess my finger had just come into contact with and again saw, "I Love Good Humor" in all its happy and sticky arrogance, gloating back at me. This did not improve my mood.
The silence in the car was a deafening reminder that someone had seriously wronged me. Perhaps only 30 seconds later, my arm again mindlessly attempted to turn on my non-existent stereo only to receive a similar sticky result and my mood changed from bad to worse. I lasted maybe another two minutes before my now music-starved arm reached out to fill the deafening silence in the car, only to nudge the same infuriating ice cream wrapper.
"OKAY, UNIVERSE. OKAY! HARDY HAR! JOKE'S ON ME! ONE OF THE THINGS I LOVE MOST IN LIFE HAS BEEN CRUELLY STOLEN AND NOW I HAVE TO DEAL WITH IT OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN BY LOOKING AT THAT STUPID WRAPPER. VERY FUNNY!"
Despite my internal rant, I kept the wrapper in its new home and I drove around that day, and the next, and the next, catching myself occasionally trying to turn on my new ice cream wrapper but which only sounded more complaints in my head.
After about a week of sulking, something magical happened. No, the wrapper didn't spontaneously begin singing show tunes. Instead of listening to music, I decided to try chanting while in the car. It felt good, really good. Then after a few days I tried singing to myself. My voice rocks when no one else is listening! I also began simply keeping quiet and thinking about the yoga class I was driving to teach. I visualized which students would be there and what they might need from a yoga class. In the quiet cell of my car, I began to notice amazing things—breathtaking things. I notices things like the silhouette of the mountains against in the moonless, pre-dawn light of the morning. I noticed the way that the car felt as I drove it, the way it would take bumps, the vibrations of the engine tingling my hands on the steering wheel, the rush of acceleration. I began to notice with acute clarity my emotions and thoughts. I began to notice that all this silence was giving me an incredible opportunity to direct my attention inward and become more aware.
My teaching and my personal practices improved almost immediately. As I practiced yoga or meditated, I no longer spent the first half of practice trying to get the last song out of my head. I began to arrive at class much more ready to teach. I was less distracted, more focused, and could read the needs of a class much quicker and effectively. I found myself finally saying the things that I'd felt but could not find words to express. I said the right things because essentially my mind had already been in class since the moment I closed the car door and began to drive.
One of things the silence whispered the loudest to me was the stark realizations that I was completely addicted, not just to music, but more pointedly to the need to have some sort of noise, to be drawn away from my own center, and hear someone else's conversation, someone else's music, someone else's jokes.
Then one day, after several weeks of this silence, while driving around, it finally dawned on me— I finally got the joke, the one that was sitting quietly and stone-faced in the car stereo cavity of the dashboard of my car. The comedic timing was perfect. There I was, a yoga and meditation teacher, zipping around town like a mad man, music and chatter blaring in my brain and filling up my head , only to screech my car to a halt, run into the yoga studio, sit down, and preach about getting quiet. Ha! What's more is that it took getting my stereo ripped off for me to understand the beauty of silence. “I get it, Universe! I get it. The joke is on me!” It took this lesson of "grandmotherly kindness," the ultimately compassionate lesson where the Zen master beats you over the head with a stick (or steals your car stereo), to teach you something crucial. For me, this essential lesson was how to know and appreciate stillness.
Eventually, I got a new stereo. Still, I learned something very valuable in those protracted months of automobile silence. I learned that no matter what our work is, if we want to do good work, we need to have a solid relationship with silence. This is what we are practicing in yoga and meditation. Now, I listen to music as a choice, not a compulsion. Now, I listen to the silence.
I love good humor.
I invite you to examine your relationship with silence and explore the power of turning off the noise to improve your ability to listen deeper.
