My dad liked to sit on the porch. Many years into his state retirement, he would get up, have his coffee and alternate his sitting/napping between the living room and the porch. In the living room, it was obvious what he was “doing”. The TV would be very loud and he’d be watching his favorite westerns between sessions of resting his eyes. The porch puzzled me, though. I would drive up, see him on the porch and ask him what he was doing. He was smart and funny and he always had some creative response that never actually answered my question.
On this first day of Spring Break, I’ve been enjoying a day of rest. The last few weeks have been exhausting and I had things scheduled through Sunday. I enjoyed a short after-lunch nap and then had a second coffee on the front porch. I parked my phone on the table Sean gave me and watched the dogs settle in for some porch naps. Several minutes passed, lost in thought and eventually I surfaced enough to realize I had been staring off into the distance for an unknown length of time. I felt relaxed. Calm. Unbothered.
I’ve been thinking about time like this recently. Time I feel we, as a society, have lost. Time spent, not being idle, but being still.
When I was very young, I remember our bathroom door. Down the hallway, the first door to the left was the bathroom. It was a long room with a countertop and a large mirror on one side and a shower on the other. At the end of the countertop there was a sink and beside the sink was the toilet. When I was a kid, the only time I can remember ever being still was on the toilet. It was honestly a little torturous for me to stay there long enough to take care of business because time spent there meant time not spent playing and going 100 miles per hour.
But in those moments of stillness, I remember the back of that door. It was a hollow, interior wood door and the large, thin sheets of wood veneer featured the natural wood grain with light and dark markings spanning the entire plane. As I sat there with my kid mind buzzing with activity, I would slow down long enough to get bored. Looking back, I know realize it took me about 3 seconds to become bored. In that boredom, my eyes would search for entertainment. As I scanned the wood grain lines on the back of the door, my eyes noticed patterns and tried to create images from the lines and shapes. I can still remember the image of a shrouded woman carrying a baby on her back. Probably similar to an image I saw in one of my dad’s National Geographic magazines. It was so abstract but I could easily find it every single time.
I’m sure you’ve done this. You’ve stared at the lines in the carpet until your eyes put some implied shapes together and created a face. Then you blinked and you couldn’t find the same image again. At the very least you’ve stared at the clouds and creatively made the puffy piles of moisture into dogs and dragons and elephants.
There is a level of stillness of the body and mind that is required for this type of exercise to be possible. Perhaps it is a level of stillness that we allow ourselves to experience less and less often in the age of constant phone entertainment. Our eyes and brains are no longer starved for puzzles to solve. Every second of boredom can be filled with a swipe of a screen and a video of someone dancing.
I downloaded Instagram in 2012 and I loved the idea of sharing a photo from each day of my life. Over the years, I’ve also enjoyed using the app to stay in touch with students from a couple of generations of teaching. I see the app as an important tool for me to use as an artist, teacher and runner. I find connection, community and sometimes education. During winter break I also found something else. I found myself scrolling almost endlessly into the night. In the late evenings when I was done with my day, I would open Instagram and start scrolling. Sometimes I’d find an idea and screenshot it or I’d see a process I wanted to revisit later and save that. But most often it was what my kids call “brain rot”. A silly video, a joke or someone’s thoughts about a current event. During those late nights, I would become a customer instead of a seller.
In moderation, all of that may be fine, but I didn’t like how I felt. An hour or more lost to scrolling through nonsense. Time I would never get back. Looking at my sketchbook during that time, I see skeletons of days. Very few sketches, very few words. Compare those sketchbook days to the days I spent my still time with a pen in my hand and you’ll see a huge difference.
In early January, I was brushing my teeth before bed. My brain was tucking itself in for the night and I caught myself staring at the fuzzy rug on the bathroom floor. Amongst the hundreds of tufts of blue yarn pushed in different directions by bare feet, dog paws and gravity, my eyes and brain worked together to show me a little man’s face with a wide, full mustache. I was staring at a rug and suddenly, I saw the yarn laid out in the shape of a man’s face. I smiled and remembered the bathroom door in my parents’ house. I remembered how creative my brain is when I give it the time and space to be still.
I’m now making a conscious effort to let my phone be a tool instead of a crutch. I will still spend some time catching up, staying in the loop and attempting to advertise my work, but I will consciously try to avoid the death scroll. I want to keep my hours and provide the stillness my brain needs to explore creativity.
In a culture where everyone keeps a phone in their hand, it may seem weird to you that I’m sitting and staring off into space. Maybe my kids will see me and ask me what I’m doing. I hope my brain will stay agile enough to come up with a funny response.
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