For years I walked the streets of London wearing noise-cancelling headphones, absorbed in playlists, politics podcasts or long voice notes from friends, and a million miles away from wherever I was. One damp January evening last year, I was walking home from my parents’ house, headphones dead in my bag, when I noticed a small figure slumped on the pavement with her eyes closed. I might not have noticed her had I been in my own world, fixated on what was playing in my ears.
I asked for her name. “Can you hear me?” I tried several times, my voice tightening. She didn’t respond, and worse, she didn’t seem to be breathing. My mind raced back to the one first aid class I took in school, but drawing a blank and worried that I might get it wrong, I dialled 999 and frantically tried to figure out if I could feel her pulse.
The call handler talked me through what to do: lie her down, compress her chest in time to a count, and keep going. The stranger took a breath and I heard sirens. Once the paramedics arrived and she could say her name, it was my cue to leave. I raced to the station, full of adrenaline, and jumped on the wrong train.
After that night, I resolved to be more aware of what happens around me. Wearing headphones made me feel as if I was swaddled in sound: it could be comforting, but the world was dulled and separate. So, off they came.
My fear of being bored quickly seemed foolish. There was plenty going on during any journey – hedges humming with bees, snippets of conversations between friends about their recent dates, preachers shouting about saving my soul – and I was finally listening to it.
I no longer muted the chaos of the city. An afternoon reading in the sun was ruined by a teenager looping around my local park on a stolen Lime bike with the alarm beeping. When the loo door didn’t stop creaking on a train journey home from the office, I was the one to get up and shut it because no one else had noticed. While stuck in a post office queue for half an hour with no distraction, I cursed myself and glowered at someone playing videos loudly on their phone – to no avail.
But there was so much I had been missing. I noticed a little boy hawking his painted pebbles from a seaside hut in Essex like a 19th-century market trader. I felt as if I’d stumbled upon a secret world when a banshee-like screech in the grass turned out to be a hedgehog in a scuffle with a blackbird (the latter won, I think). And it’s remarkable how many people I hear singing in the park, like the woman whispering hymns to her pomeranians.
In spring, a thunderous crack alerted me to a woodpecker drilling holes in a tree during a lunchtime walk in my local park. I returned one day to see it feeding its young, their beaks poking out of the trunk. After reading Jenny Odell’s account of birdwatching in How to Do Nothing, I even started learning about bird calls. I can now pick out a robin’s song or a jay’s croak from a cacophony of squalling parakeets.
Plus, I’m more open to talking to people in public than I was. It’s easier to start a conversation if my first response is not “What?” as I peel off my headphones. That said, it also makes me a prime target for tourists asking for directions. Their faces fall when I type their destination into Google Maps, which they already have open.
Still, it helps to have the option to zone out. I refuse to go for a run without blasting Cuban music in my ears to force my trainers to hit the ground with the beat. There’s no way I’m getting on an aeroplane without first downloading an audiobook. But it is more of a conscious choice now than a crutch.
As for that January night, I’ll never know what happened to the stranger, but I’m glad I was paying attention.
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