[Jamon]

Yeah. That's one reason why I've been trying to keep earplugs in, because the brain adjusts and then you don't know the actual physical effect. If someone's ears are ringing after a concert, and days after, they just slowly transition into the damage and when the ringing stops it feels like they're back to normal, but how do they know that it's not just a new normal?

I took earplugs out for some seconds, and it feels like it's mostly settled in terms of that wounded sensation and fullness. But the actual hearing isn't back to how it was. It could get better, but if I didn't have earplugs in most of the time I wouldn't have any memory to compare. Right now my brain is used to how it was prior to earplugs, so if I take them out for less than a minute once a day it doesn't give the brain much chance to adjust and you can feel it not matching what it expects so you know there's a physical difference.

I don't have an audio career so I could still survive deaf. But it really is something that you have to try not to become saddened by. If you dwell on it too much you'd just want to curl up and cry, because unlike a lot of other parts of our body, the hearing just doesn't ever heal physically. It's more like losing a finger than just a scrape. It never comes back. You can go on, and still do great things, but you're doing it handicapped to a degree.

It's similar with the teeth. If you get a blast there, like while drinking from a glass bottle, part of your tooth is gone, forever. If you eat and drink acidic foods, like citrus fruit, and don't rinse after, the acids erode the enamel, and then you end up with permanently weakened teeth. They can then start losing visible portion, cavities. We can fill those holes in a lot of the time, but it's never going to be the same, you're just adjusted.

Hearing is different than teeth though because our very existence is felt through the senses. It is us. It is how we feel as a being. If we're blind, we're a very different feeling person than someone who sees. If you have a cold, or allergies, and your ears are all full, you sense yourself and the world differently. It's fundamental. If that never got better, it's like being trapped in a box, that's buried and cemented forever. The full potential of you is limited, and eventually the brain adjusts to redefine who you are so there isn't an irritating conflict, but you changed. You're not the same.

I don't want to be damaged. I don't want to hear the world through distorted walls that I just have to get used to. It makes the world darker. It makes me less alive and fully aware within it. Losing hearing makes everything duller. Even if you adjust, and feel like you're right in the world again, you're just forgetting what you're missing. But if you remember, it's sad. Then you look over and see someone with big hearing aid, and another using sign language.

It's not very pretty. We're all damaged, crippled in some way. Some lucky people are very healthy in their youth, but even they accumulate the damaging effects of aging and accidents. It's necessary that we continue on, doing the best we can with what we've got. But it's easy to be depressed about if you really think about it. What we want, is to be perfect and whole, forever. We want to improve, and age up rather than down. When there's a new change, we want it to be a new feature, a new revision, that brings exciting new positive change.

But that's not the universe, that's our mind emerging from it, and keeps us struggling against impossible odds. Beneath that everything is falling apart, getting worse. We're like statues of mud trying to dance as our grains of sand collapse and return us to earth. All we want is to be solid, stable, whole, and dance for always. It's that conflict that makes some people not want to get out of bed. Why dance when you only get a second as you fall?

Without animation, the planet is dead. There is just rock, and sand. There are no sounds to be heard. It moves in its own way, but lacks the depth and richness of higher life. There's no one to appreciate those fleeting seconds. Which may only be seconds, but it's the rhythm of the planet. One goes up, expresses, collapses, and another pops up in its place. It's like dancing fountains of water and light. That's what we are. That's what music is.

Even if that finely detailed spray loses its outer droplets, drops in pressure, and becomes a blunted stream, it's still animation, and something to express as it all fades away. Even when born full and whole, it is only maximum by human standards, and soon even the best of us might seem like cripples, where higher lifeforms pity them and ask why the world has to be so cruel to force feeling entities into such limited forms.

So we just have to let go, and aim for the heavens. We individually may never get there, but that's the beat of life, and every one of us is and always will be a part of that. Not easy to do though. Especially if someone were highly skilled, with precision hearing, widely known and regarded, being given important work, and some stupid accident caused their hearing to change forever. Really difficult not to just constantly dwell on that, and snap in frustration, "Heal ears! HEAL!".

That's another thing earplugs do, make it easy to forget. When you can't hear that something is wrong, it's easy to ignore, and then you don't feel bad about it. I wish medical technology would hurry up and go through some major rapid explosions in development. There's so many people going through miseries right now they shouldn't have to.