The Need for White Noise in Absolution

Outside the doors of all the psychologist and therapist offices there are small circular devices. In all the times I have wandered near these I did not give them a thought. Well I didn’t until tonight. This evening as I looked down I guessed these were some kind of air purifier. As I stood there just trying to sort it out I realized that they were white noise generators. Screwed up hearing may have played a part in me not noticing the tones they generate, that you very much Johnny Winter at Jenison Field House.

When we spill our secrets to God, to our lawyers, to our doctors there is a wall that is supposed to exist between what we are unburdening ourselves of and the rest of the world. There are things we have done that rally require a wall between the truth and the outside world. Acts we might be unburdening our souls of could include murder, it might be an impure sexual desire or it might be that cookie we stole at age 7 that started the huge fight between father and big brother that they never quite reconciled over. Our soul’s secrets need to be offloaded. We need to get this stuff out. To heal we need to air it to someone or something but it is not for public display.

Walls these days in modern buildings tend to be cheap and thin. Ceilings have no batting to muffle the sound. And if your voice falls within a certain range, a certain wave length it might be heard as clear as a bell in a next room or God forbid the waiting area. These noise machines are a good idea.

I think that we all do need to confess at some point or another. We need someone to lay out the details of our imperfection to. We need someone to offer us guidance and correction. We need someone to offer us acceptance in our imperfection. We need someone to offer us absolution so our perceived misdeeds do not haunt us through the years of our life. Without help we can steer in an emotional and moral circle for days, years well ultimately the whole of our lives.

Still when we offer up our issues to amateurs we risk so much. Loose lips ruin lives. We need both trustworthy confidants and white noise between our conversations and that world which is always looking for weakness, our weakness. We have to talk to someone. In a movie I saw once Woody Allen talked about bottling up his emotions. He said that for each anxiety he grew a new tumor. I so totally get that.

Normally I would rail about white noise and how it keeps us from getting down to the truth, from drilling down to the heart of the matter. But in this case I think the concept of a barrier between certain kinds of truths liberates those who need to be free of the troubling secrets of their lives. It allows the rest of us not to give into our baser instincts to overhear, to catalog and to gossip for our own advantage or for the injury of others.