Cue Soundtrack

I had several friends run the half marathon today in Champaign-Urbana. My house is two blocks from the route at the 4 mile mark. We discussed with our friends last night their running times and figured what time we should be out there this morning to root them on towards victory. My neighborhood turned out in forces only seen for the Labor Day Parade with lots of people holding homemade signs, hooting and hollering and shaking cowbells. As a bystander to the marathon, it genuinely made me a little teary and immensely proud to live in my neighborhood.

There was a time in my life (many many years ago) when I ran—and not for a Dansko sale. I never would have considered running without music. My running mixes were as vital to my run as the shoes. This morning I was genuinely surprised by how many runner had earbuds popped in. I know were I in any kind of shape to run a half marathon, I would also need the driving beats of Rob Zombie and Kelly Clarkson dance remixes to get me across the finish line. I cannot help but wonder if some part of the experience was missed by the earbud runners. Did they hear the cowbells? Hear us tell them they looked awesome? Hear my daughter’s whistle? If not, then why the heck did I drag my family out there at 7:30am on a Saturday morning? If our friends Todd, Donna, Chuck, Seth, Mike, Judy and Will had all been wearing earbuds, would they have heard us yell for them? Perhaps but I am not confident.

I see people all the time wearing earbuds: the hallways at school, in cars, walking to class or around the mall or my neighborhood, shopping at the grocery store. It is inescapable. I worry about this. It may seem silly but I really do. While it is nice to have a soundtrack for simply anything and everything I may be doing, from dropping off a library book to gardening, what is being missed? Who did I not stop and say hello to in the grocery store because I didn’t notice them? What hilarious conversation did I not overhear on the bus? What did I not learn about my child today because we didn’t talk while we were walking to the library?

The constant deluge of technology in our everyday lives is amazing and can make our lives information rich. I would venture that unless we learn to also disconnect from this technology sometimes, we will become socially (and hence emotionally, psychologically, and physically) poorer.