Squinting your ears.Hmmm. Where do I even start with that?   

I’m a bonafide old guy. I was born in the first half of the last century. I say that to people when they ask how old I am. Saying my actual age is just sort of a number to people (unless your my cousin who majored in statistics). But claiming antiquity as your birth era has gravitas. I don’t actually know how to define gravitas, but I know it when I see it. And I have it. 

But I digress. For the non-gravitas segment of readers, let me restate my age in a more meaningful way. I was born before TV. Not before TV was a thing. Or before TV was popular. I was born before there was even one actual TV.   

Now some of you don’teven remember what life was like before microwaves. Pshaw. I know what life was like before TV when radios were the thing. And they were the size of apartment refrigerators … with 47 knobs … of which only two actually worked (on/off/volume and station selector). 

But apparently TV was waiting for me to be born, and it didn’t take long before TV realized that and began to target me with ... 

CARTOONS!   

Within a few years, every single kid of my generation devoted three good hours every Saturday morning to CARTOONS! It was cartoon show after cartoon show. It was glorious. Us kids had the TV and CARTOONS! all to ourselves. 

That was when I learned about squinting your ears. 

It was a wonderful, glorious, beautiful Saturday morning (I think it was raining, but who cared … CARTOONS!). And our neighbor stopped by to talk with Dad about something terribly unimportant, but the conversation took place in the living room where I was with the TV …and CARTOONS! 

I reached over to turn up the volume because of the annoying adult conversation going on making it impossible for me to hear CARTOONS! 

“Don’t touch that dial!” It was Dad in his not to be ignored Father voice. 

“But Dad, I can’t hear my CARTOONS!” 

“Leave the volume where it is. Squint your ears.” 

And there it was. His entire solution to a world full of cacophony. Squint your ears. 

He was insistent. I was indignant. Turns out, he was right. When the world gets louder, don’t compete with it. Turning up the volume doesn’t help. In fact, it hurts. It just makes everything too loud. 

But if you “squint your ears,” you find the competing noise doesn’t get softer … it just doesn’t get your attention. 

If you’ve ever been in a group of people where everyone is talking to someone, you can look across the room and pick out a person and if you listen carefully, you can actually pick their voice out of all the other voices and hear what they are saying. 

Squinting your ears. 

You’re listening to music that is transporting you and you realize your cellphone has been ringing for awhile. 

Squinting your ears. 

Apparently (and this is the big finish, folks) attention is like money. We can spread it around and not get very much for it overall. Or we can heap it up and “pay” attention (see what I did there?) to just one thing, and for that moment, that one thing becomes our world. 

Why? Because I have a sneaking suspicion most of us have chosen to up the volume rather than reduce the input. 

I’m thinking maybe the problem isn’t that there’s nothing worth hearing. Maybe we’vejust gotten so used to turning up the volume,we’ve forgotten there’s other ways to listen. 

Maybe we need to squint our ears. 

Who knows? There may just be CARTOONS!