My gracious! Our ears, what vital appendages they are!
We certainly appreciate their auditory function, but do we really understand and admire the other multitude of things these fleshy attachments to our skull do for us? It goes way beyond hearing.
What moves me to herald the ears? Let me count the ways!
Since the beginning of human creation, the majority of us, along with other mammals, crocodiles and many lizards, have had the ability to hear. Hearing, a momentous survival and social tool. A precious gift. With hearing, we have music, we sing, we have language, we chat and sigh, groan and laugh, squeal and giggle.
Then came ornamentation. For millennium we have adorned ourselves, using our ears as a dais for earrings. And beyond earrings, strange things can happen to earlobes, such as extending them and/or putting a hole in them. All in the name of beauty, status or identity.
And this leads us to be the last several hundred years and the advent of spectacles, eyeglasses. So many of us are now wearing glasses for sight correction, and there are sunglasses to protect our eyes. Furthermore, frames now are so beautiful and so well designed, people choose to wear a pair of glasses as an accessory, for ornamentation and to give an air of gravitas. All those pairs of glasses come with arms and the curvy bit at the end of the arms goes around our ears.
The gift of listening to music and the spoken words can become an enhanced private solo choice – enter the headset and now the earbuds. There they are, nestled into our ears discreetly attaching us to the world via the universe. Our own astounding audio cocoon. But it does not stop there for our hardworking ears – you may guess what’s coming next —the masks, the Covid masks. They come with elastic that in its turn must find some room for our survival around the back of our ears.
Thank you dear ears.
So where does that leave me? Ears pierced, wearing earrings. Glasses perched on my nose and ears all my waking hours long. My earbuds are in for my favourites – podcasts and music from the iPod or phone. And finally, there is the mask. The whole enchilada of ear-gear! It is winter now and there is more fun in store as the whole shebang gets covered with a hat. Getting all this in place is already a challenge, but untangling the whole is like Alexander the Great dealing with the Gordian knot! A tangle of audio cable, mask elastic caught in the glasses. All the while, I am doing my best to prevent the earrings from popping off as they get caught in all this confusion.
As a child, I was told I was plain, but my mother reassured me that I did have lovely ears – “like shells.” This was obviously considered a permissible feature, discreetly hidden away most of the time beneath my hair. No danger of developing inappropriate ideas of vanity grandeur!
Our dear ears, let us love them. What will we expect of them in the future with the demands of new inventions, devices, and pandemics? Maybe with evolution, we will develop larger, deeper ears to accommodate the needs of technology and social emergencies.