April 03, 2003
not seeing is believing
I've been doing this... meditation, I guess you could call it. At school, usually.
After a long period of doing everything, I try to find a comfortable spot in the sun somewhere, and I sit back and close my eyes. It's not black, since the light through my eyelids gives my vision a sort of red-orange haze. But it's not-seeing.
And it's amazing what I miss when I'm so focused on seeing everything. Have you ever tried to listen to everything, without filtering what you hear? What we think of as silence, with no one talking and no other loud sounds, isn't very silent at all. Just outside, where one might have said it was peaceful and quiet, I heard the bird singing, airplanes overhead, the wind rustling the trees, people talking on the other side of (the very small) campus, insects buzzing. All the sounds I forget to hear most of the time.
Then, besides the sound, the very air around you that you never notice at all is full of things that you'd miss if you never stopped to actually feel them. You can't notice the wind blowing against your arms, brushing your hair against your face, rippling your clothes, or smell the grass, the dust, the indefinable smell of transient people, when your mind is focused on watching where you're going so you can get to class on time.
I have to stop trying to keep track of time while I do this. I don't wear a watch, I sit outside, and I trust the bell system to keep me from being late. Time is just another filter we process things through, another way to put our lives in a nice, neat, orderly line so we don't have to stop and think about what we're doing and why. We know that we have to be somewhere at exactly 9:30, and that's all that matters until 9:31. What would we do if we didn't have to worry about being late all the time? What could we do?
It's amazing, then, how much clearer I can see when I stop trying to see. After getting used to the red haze, the sudden shock of so much detail and complexity is staggering. I miss so much of what I see all the time simply because I'm used to looking at it. The interplay of shadows on the ground, the myriad sharp lines of grass and pinestraw, and the colors of... everything. I forget how blue the sky is.
After a long period of doing everything, I try to find a comfortable spot in the sun somewhere, and I sit back and close my eyes. It's not black, since the light through my eyelids gives my vision a sort of red-orange haze. But it's not-seeing.
And it's amazing what I miss when I'm so focused on seeing everything. Have you ever tried to listen to everything, without filtering what you hear? What we think of as silence, with no one talking and no other loud sounds, isn't very silent at all. Just outside, where one might have said it was peaceful and quiet, I heard the bird singing, airplanes overhead, the wind rustling the trees, people talking on the other side of (the very small) campus, insects buzzing. All the sounds I forget to hear most of the time.
Then, besides the sound, the very air around you that you never notice at all is full of things that you'd miss if you never stopped to actually feel them. You can't notice the wind blowing against your arms, brushing your hair against your face, rippling your clothes, or smell the grass, the dust, the indefinable smell of transient people, when your mind is focused on watching where you're going so you can get to class on time.
I have to stop trying to keep track of time while I do this. I don't wear a watch, I sit outside, and I trust the bell system to keep me from being late. Time is just another filter we process things through, another way to put our lives in a nice, neat, orderly line so we don't have to stop and think about what we're doing and why. We know that we have to be somewhere at exactly 9:30, and that's all that matters until 9:31. What would we do if we didn't have to worry about being late all the time? What could we do?
It's amazing, then, how much clearer I can see when I stop trying to see. After getting used to the red haze, the sudden shock of so much detail and complexity is staggering. I miss so much of what I see all the time simply because I'm used to looking at it. The interplay of shadows on the ground, the myriad sharp lines of grass and pinestraw, and the colors of... everything. I forget how blue the sky is.
# posted by Liadan @ 6:53 PM 
