Echo

Today, we discuss the natural phenomenon of echoes, by taking a trip to the mountains, as well as deep in our minds and social circles. We will also try to identify whether an echo is a harmless auditory sensation, or if there is something else we should take into account when we experience them.

“Into the echo chamber of his own mind, where he was always able to find a justification for the most terrible actions.”

— Una McCormack

I am not an avid traveller. However, when asked for a preference, I am usually a beach person. I love the infinity and vastness of the ocean. The sound of crashing waves brings about a sense of stillness in me which I chase mentally every time I have the idea or privilege to plan a holiday.

However, many people around me are mountain people, plus where I live in India, accessibility to mountains and hill stations is way higher than the ocean. Consequently, I have had the privilege of visiting many a hill stations in my life.

While I complain a lot about the complexity involved in reaching the destination, the result is always worth it. Everything about hill stations is the epitome of the creator at work. The beauty, serenity and peace are all notions to behold and appreciate.

The greenery on the trees, the pure air and pristine snow in winters make the mountains such sought after places for many in the urban areas. Especially in the winter season, since the levels of pollution people experience in Delhi are way too high for the likings of many (I’m fine, thanks for asking).

There are a multitude of natural phenomena one can experience whilst in the company of the mountains. I remember the first time I experienced snowfall.

It wasn’t as voluminous as you might have seen in movies or experienced, but viewing the white, cotton-like snow fall from the sky invoked a childlike wonder in me, and it was fortuitous for me, since I happened to be walking down a long hike at the time this happened.

The top of the hike, however, still is embedded in my memory like yesterday. You could tell that it had been snowing in the area, and way more than I was able to experience at the time. The view from the edge of the cliff was something out of a painting.

I remember me and a friend of mine being completely dumbstruck, because the view had captivated every fraction of our psychic energies. “We’ve got to go, the bus is leaving”, my friend finally summoned the first words in 15 minutes.

She almost mumbled the words, but the emptiness made it reverberate into my ears. It was an auditory miracle, an echo, which further made me go deep into my thought journey, as I requested for five more minutes there.

The concept of echoes is immensely fascinating to me. A combination of space, sound and surfaces causes an amplification, and reverberation of the smallest of sounds that are spoken in mountainous regions. People miles away are also known get murmurs of these echoes.

Now that I have some very pretty context setting, we can come back to our philosophical neck of the woods. What is the commonality between an echo and the human mind, you ask? Let’s take a minute to discuss that, shall we?

When experiencing an echo, the originator of the sound hears exactly what they had uttered, sometimes for tens of seconds on end. When it comes to the human mind, we too, sometimes experience and even love, echoes in our daily lives, and I don’t mean a real echo.

Part of being in society is identifying and spending time with people we admire, and what could we admire more than people who think exactly like us? Today, it is much easier than ever to find, connect with & maintain relationships with people like us through the marvel that is social media.

Social media allows us to post our thoughts and beliefs to a very large audience, and also allows others to affirm them and provide feedback to us. However, what we fail to take into account is,

If we only surround ourselves with like minded people, we risk never knowing we are wrong, or we need to be corrected.

The term echo chamber is one that truly describes social media. While every channel touts diversity as a benefit, more often than not we only follow people with whom our thoughts align. But this way of living has some catastrophic outcomes, some of which don’t surface until very late.

I can think about a lot of examples, cults and terrorist organisations being the most obvious ones. If the members of these groups were open to listening and evaluating thoughts other than their own, could we have possibly prevented manslaughter and violence in this society? I think, we could have.

Now, how do we prevent this? I feel a part of the responsibility lies on us to not be offended by every opinion out there. This will help increase our tolerance of understanding others’ opinions, and increase our ability to evaluate a more diverse set of influences.

If you stuck around this far, thank you for your time. If you enjoyed this, share this with one friend of yours whom you think will benefit from reading this. Thanks for reading, and I will see you in the next one. 🙂