“Do You Hear What I Hear”?
First: the answer is no. I’ll come back to that shortly.
Second: I read an
article about the history of that sweet Christmas song, “Do You Hear What I
Hear”, this morning and I am attaching a link to that at the end of this post. Amazing!
Beautiful! Sweet and EVER
TIMELY! Please read and share if you
will!
So, no. We do not
hear identically. The way we hear sound
is as individual as the prints on our fingers and the memories we save in our
brains. The ear itself is so beautifully designed. All the tiny parts, like miniature musical
instruments really, coordinating with the nerves, tissue, bone, brain to bring
input from the outer environment into sensible information in the form of the
sounds we hear. But each ear is uniquely ours.
I do not recognize my own recorded voice. We all hear sound at different decibels. Some ranges of sound are out of our hearing
ability entirely but the waves are there for those whose hearing can catch
them. There is this odd little
fact: we filter what we hear, or our
brains do. We become accustomed to some
constant sounds that would interfere with our daily functions if we couldn’t. Guess what!
We all filter differently. You
and I can sit together in the same room and experience sound in completely
different ways.
And then, our hearing can diminish over time. The nerves age. We begin to struggle with conversations in
crowds or rooms that are acoustically poor.
Voices from the next room are less intelligible: “Honey, will you bring me a coke?” “When did you start smoking again?” (We have
had MUCH WEIRDER exchanges than this in my house)
We resist the realization that it is happening to us as long
as we can. We settle for incomplete sound for lots of reasons. Denial that age is diminishing our abilities,
costliness of the devices, vanity (we don’t want to look “old”)…but the price
of settling is to have a lesser experience of life.
Not hearing = social
isolation. I read recently that loss of
sight does not limit your ability to engage with the people in your world but
loss of hearing does. I have watched Mom
actually “shut down” when her hearing aid failed and could not be immediately
got working again with a battery change.
She closed her eyes and went into a state of non-communication until the
hearing aid could be fixed.
My 89 year-old mother has declined to purchase a second
hearing device until now because in her opinion the one she has been using for
all these many years is just fine and it is the rest of us that are deficient
anyway. I have a “speech impediment” and
am prone to mutter, mumble and am mean-spirited enough to talk to her when I am
facing away – like doing dishes and cooking and stuff. (Yes.
I am that mean-spirited.) A
family fable has it that “Aunt Merle”, at 90 years of age, declined a new
hearing aid because she felt sure she would not get her money’s worth.
Another odd fact is that when one finally does accept a
hearing aid the hearing is not immediately corrected. The brain that has been deprived of sound for
so long must relearn how to process the increased volume it is receiving and
turn it into meaningful information like speech, music, and the clicks,
whistles and whooshes of the world around us.
When Mom got a new hearing aid this past Saturday she
expressed disappointment to the audiologist that the volume setting of the
device was not much different than the level at which she thought she had been
hearing. As we wheeled through the store
she complained that it was very noisy there.
Outside, she covered her ears at the cacophony of traffic sounds, birds,
sirens. Mom was quiet on the ride home,
overwhelmed I think, by the noise of the engine and the wind created by the
motion of the cars on the highway. That
night she was anxious to go to bed. She
had promised to remove the hearing aid only to sleep and she was ready to be
relieved of it at a very early hour. She
said the ear was “heavy”. (That is aphasia-speak for “I have had enough of this
today”.)
Over the next few weeks we are told it will get better. I noticed some improvement today in a visit
around the kitchen table that Mom would normally have disengaged from. Mom was able to keep up with most of the conversation. That is a nice change.
She will have to resist the temptation to take the aid out
of her ear when she is tired of it.
Removing the devise like that apparently causes the brain to fail to
adapt.
Hearing again after deafness opens up wider social
possibilities. Once the brain has gotten
used to the new input and she is organizing the all the noise that she is
hearing now into meaningful sounds, Mom will be able to enjoy company
again. A speech therapist told us that
hearing better could also improve her memory and cognitive challenges. I am
already able to speak to her at a more normal volume with less repetition and
that is a blessed relief!
The benefits of using the wonderful, God-Given technology
available to us in this miraculous age we are fortunate enough to be living in,
to recover our lost hearing ability far outweighs the cost to our pockets or
egos. From my perspective, a big loud
YES!
I know I went long on this post and if you are still with me
by now I hope you will stay a little longer and have a look at this article about
the Christmas song “Do You Hear “What I Hear”.
Pray for peace, people everywhere…
Love and Gratitude, Lisa
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