In Discovery Channel’s Dual Survival, bush hippie survivalist Cody Lundin says that being barefoot for over 20 years has enabled him to slow-down and pay attention to where he is going.

Surrounded by cyber-warrior modernists who are simultaneously texting, chatting on the cell phone, watching a dvd, and driving through a busy intersection, this statement appealed to my Luddite sensibilities. Combined that with my love of J.S. Bach’s seeming simplicity and Cage’s asceticism, it’s easy to understand how I can hear where Lundin is coming from. If you place his statement alongside the beat aphorism “We’re going nowhere fast,” or even “Fools rush in” you realize it’s a full inversion. We’re slowly getting somewhere. A far more rewarding proposition.

One of the things that have changed in my adulthood are the brakes I find myself applying more frequently. Some call it patience, but I see it as proceeding with caution. I twist a wrench slower, I press a button to a motorized device more sparingly. I believe lesser, more meaningful notes can make more music. It’s the path we all have to travel towards eventual silence, oneness…the final void. The popular conception is that sound, vision, reasoning, general sensations and sensory abilities all disappear with age. I think it’s perception vs. reality.

It’s not that sounds, for example, disappear. It’s that we have learned to progressively do more with less, until the pause between each note has stretched to such a daredevil length we have stopped hearing the music. Thus music hasn’t stopped: we just forgot how long ago the last note sounded, and eventually, we finally don’t make it to the next one.