By Noah Massaro
“So, I know a lot of you didn’t do as well as you wanted on the test. This is always the hardest one, so I’ve got a few extra credit opportunities for you all.”
The words shook Tim out of the stupor that usually held him in his Selfpersonal Communication class. Normally, he completely zoned out during the professor’s lectures, but the prospect of extra credit was enough to get him to pay attention.
Newly attentive, Tim listened as his professor listed out a few different events happening in the next two weeks. The only one that both worked with his schedule and didn’t sound like a massive pain was a guest speaker the university had scheduled the next evening. As he packed up getting ready to leave the class, Tim took a note of the time and place for the speech.
The next day was a free day for Tim, meaning he slept late, as usual. After finally dragging himself out of bed at the crack of noon, he listlessly did homework, and once that was finished spent the next few hours rewatching old episodes of “The Office” and browsing social media. Before he knew it, it was time to leave for the speech.
Tim arrived at the location of the talk just before it was scheduled to start. Hardly any students had shown up, so he was able to get a spot near the front. After a few more minutes of preparation, the speaker walked onto the stage to begin the speech.
The most obvious characteristic of the speaker was her white cane and large dark glasses. In case there was any doubt, she warmed up the audience with a few self-deprecating comments about the accident that caused her blindness. Once the speech got underway though, Tim barely noticed it because the speech was so engrossing. It was all about how her accident had changed her perspective on life.
She claimed that losing her sight was the best thing that ever happened to her.
“Light is a good thing,” she said. “But for me, it had become a crutch. I relied on what I could see. Losing my vision forced me to use my other senses. Now, of course, you’re thinking, ‘That’s nice, she can hear well.’ But its more than that. Now I can tell someone’s body language by the sounds their clothing makes, or the pauses in their speech patterns, or even slight vibrations from crossing and uncrossing their legs.”
She finally concluded her speech with a challenge: “To all of you here, I’ve got a challenge for you. When you go back to your place tonight, try turning off all the lights. Spend your free time in darkness, and see what it does for you.”
As she thanked the audience, Tim considered her challenge. On the one hand, what could turning off the lights do other than waste a night of his time? On the other, he didn’t have any plans or responsibilities tonight. In fact, his roommate wasn’t even going to be around, so there was no chance of bothering anyone. By the time he arrived at his dorm, he had made up his mind to try it.
Upon entering, he tossed his backpack on the bed, shut the door, closed the curtains, and turned off the lights, leaving the room in near-total blackness. With that completed, his next thought was, “Now what?” His first instinct told him to turn on Netflix to fill the boredom. But as he opened his computer and the light flooded out of the monitor, he realized that would defeat the purpose.
“This’ll be tougher than I thought,” Tim said to himself.
The noise startled him; he hadn’t realized he had talked aloud. Presently, after thinking some more, he turned on some music. With nothing else to do, he sat on his bed in the darkness and listened to the song playing.
However, the experience of listening felt different. Normally, Tim only listened to music in the car. But when driving, it wasn’t possible to focus on the music exclusively; he had to devote some attention to the road. Now though, he could fully focus on the music itself, with all the detail that went into it.
After listening to music for about an hour, Tim got bored. He thought long and hard about something else he could do in his free time that didn’t require light, but he couldn’t come up with anything. Eventually, he decided to just go to bed and get the day over with. As he prepared for sleep, he glanced at his phone, which informed him that it was over two and a half hours earlier than his usual bedtime.
The next morning, Tim awoke before his alarm went off. He immediately noticed something different. It took him a moment to figure out what had changed. He realized it a moment later, remarking to himself that he didn’t feel nearly as tired as he normally did in the mornings. Normally, he had to drag himself out of bed to get up on time, but today he realized he had at least 30 more minutes before he had to leave.
Under normal circumstances, realizing he had more sleep time, Tim would have gratefully fallen back asleep. But filled with energy, Tim decided to get breakfast instead. Just before he left his room, he grabbed his pair of sunglasses off his dresser. As he walked into the cafeteria, he spotted his friend Marin. She looked up in surprise as he sat down next to her.
“Oh! Hi, Tim,” she said. “I never see you up this early.”
“I got to sleep early last night,” he replied, starting on his burrito.
That seemed to please her. “I keep telling you to get more sleep and eat breakfast. Don’t your parents ever nag you about your sleep schedule and stuff?”
“I’ve got stuff to do,” he replied lamely. As she gave him a disbelieving look, he took another bite of his breakfast. “Actually, this is going to sound stupid, but I went to sleep because I had nothing else to do.”
He related the story of the blind speaker and her challenge to spend an evening in the dark.
After he finished, Marin looked at him with some confusion. “Cool?” she asked. “I guess that’s fun.” They chatted for a few more minutes before she stood up to leave. “Well you should try to get to bed early again tonight,” she commented on the way out. Tim rolled his eyes as he prepared to leave as well.
His first class that morning was a boring lecture. Normally, he was too tired to pay attention, and on the rare occasions when that wasn’t the case, the professor was so boring that Tim usually started browsing Facebook on his computer within 20 minutes. This day started no differently. After 15 minutes of a 60-something-year-old professor mumbling about thermodynamics in a big lecture hall while an ugly powerpoint played in the background, Tim felt his mind beginning to wander. Casting his mind back to the morning, he remembered his sunglasses. Desperate for any form of entertainment, he put them on, reducing the already dim lecture hall to near darkness.
The darkness was relaxing. Normally, Tim would take a nap in this situation, but since he got enough sleep the previous night, he decided that he might as well pay attention to the class. With the sunglasses on, he wasn’t distracted by the garish orange slideshow, so he actually had some success understanding the lecture. By the time the class ended, Tim felt that he had learned more in this class than he had in any of the previous ones despite missing one of his senses.
During the rest of the day, Tim reflected on the speech he had heard the previous evening and the impact it had on him so far. Although he didn’t want to admit it, he finally was forced to admit to himself that the advice worked and that his day was more successful by spending some time in the dark. By the time he finished eating dinner and doing homework, he decided to continue the experiment for the next few days.
As he finally returned to his room, shut the blinds and prepared his playlist, Marin texted him asking where he was. After a quick texted conversation, they agreed to hang out for the evening in his room in 30 minutes. Tim spent the time daydreaming while listening to music in the dark. After the half-hour had passed, Marin knocked on the door. He hurried to let her in. When she stepped into the darkened room, she instinctually reached for the light switch, but Tim stopped her. As she turned to him questioningly, he explained.
“Hey, remember what I said at breakfast? About spending the evening in darkness?”
He couldn’t see her expression, but he could tell from the tone of her voice that she was confused. “I thought you were joking,” she said.
“Nope. And I’m doing it again tonight.” He sat down on his bed. “Care to join me?”
She hesitated for a moment. “OK, whatever. I have homework to do though, so I have to go soon anyway.”
The two spent the next couple of hours chatting in the darkness. At first, Tim noticed how weird it was to have a conversation without being able to see the other person. Then again, he reflected, when the two of them hung out, they usually looked at memes on their phones a lot anyway, so it wasn’t all that different. Tim found that without the ability to use visual cues, he had to pay extra close attention to inflection and tone to determine the meaning. Indeed, by being unable to see her face, he felt like he could be more open and honest. When the time arrived for her to leave, he mentioned how he had worn his sunglasses in class earlier. “Are you going to do it again?” she asked. Tim hadn’t decided until that point, but her question made him realize he already knew the answer. “Yeah,” he said. After she left, he spent a bit longer listening to music, then went to bed.
The next week or so fell into a pattern. During the day, he wore his dark sunglasses whenever he got the chance. There were some classes where that wasn’t possible, but even in those, Tim did his best to use his sense of hearing as much as possible, thus relying less on sight. During the evening, he quickly ate dinner with his friends, did his homework, then went back to his room to sit in the darkness. Once, Marin joined him, but she complained about having to keep the light off, so she didn’t stay long.
During those evenings, Tim eventually got bored of only listening to music. One evening, on a whim, he started doing pushups and situps in the dark. He stopped quickly though since he was out of shape from not exercising. Every night, he went to bed early enough to get a full night’s sleep and still get up early the next day. The significance of all this didn’t escape him.
“This darkness thing is fixing my life,” he said to Marin one night at dinner, wearing his sunglasses.
“If you can’t tell, I’m rolling my eyes,” she shot back. Although she was obviously being sarcastic, Tim thought he detected a note of something else in her voice. Admiration, perhaps? For the rest of the meal, he listened more closely for that tone. Whenever she spoke to him, it was faint but present. Although, thinking back, Tim realized she spoke with that note whenever they hung out together.
Suddenly, Tim guessed what was going on. Although he wouldn’t have noticed normally, he still wasn’t totally sure he could assume that with just the sound of her voice. As their conversation had lulled, he took the opportunity to whip off his sunglasses. By doing so, he caught her staring intently at his face. As she saw this, she blushed a little and looked down.
“Sorry,” she started apologizing, but Tim cut her off. By combining the admiring tone she used with him with her flustered reaction, he was now completely certain. He leaned in and whispered something to her.
At that, she looked extraordinarily pleased. “Took you long enough to see it,” she said.
