Raivavae, Les Australes 7 May 2011, 18:00 p.m. Tahiti Time 23S52 147W41
I’ve been thinking a lot about what is in a dog watch for me. Besides taking time to read, and listen to music, I often become contemplative, and I often write too much. I came across a passage in Alan De Botton’s “The Art of Travel” which provides a relevant perspective.:
“Journeys are the midwives of thought. Few places are more conducive to internal conversations than moving planes, ships or trains. There is an almost quaint correlation between what is before our eyes and the thoughts we are able to have in our heads: large thoughts at times requiring large views, and new thoughts, new places. Introspective reflections that might otherwise be liable to stall are helped along by the flow of the landscape. The mind may be reluctant to think properly when thinking is all it is supposed to do; the task can be as paralysing as having to tell a joke or mimic an accent on demand. Thinking improves when parts of the mind are given other tasks – charged with listening to music, for example, or following a line of trees. The music or the view distracts for a time that nervous, censorious, practical part of the mind which is inclined to shut down when it notices something difficult emerging in consciousness, and which runs scared of memories, longings and introspective or original ideas, preferring instead the administrative and the impersonal.”
Now the challenge for me is how to “think properly” when not journeying. How could I bring that thinking state more consistently into my landfall life. I know some people get there with a daily run, or a morning meditation. My mom seeks it out through frequent travel, my dad through long walks in the woods, my brother has built it into his career shuttling folks across Kachemak Bay in Blue Too. So I have lots of good role models, experts on integrating that space into daily life but somewhere along the line between toddlers-to-teens, and breadwinning, I never properly nurtured it as a habit. And it’s hard for me to ignore the distractions without an externally mandated zone like a dog watch.
From a recent Boston Globe article on “The Power of Lonely” : “People tend to engage quite automatically with thinking about the minds of other people…We’re multitasking when we’re with other people in a way that we’re not when we just have an experience by ourselves”
I think one of my own greatest strengths (and weaknesses), is “thinking about the minds of others.” Pleasing others, mirroring others listening intently to others – all come easily to me, but it’s not all of who I am. Disengaging in that “collaborative thinking” (a.k.a. group think in it’s darker guise) when I’m around people is really hard for me, and my own voice can become faint in the din.
The article goes on to say: “Teenagers, especially whose personalities have not yet fully formed, have been shown to benefit from time spent apart from others, in part because it allows for a kind of introspection and freedom from self-consciousness that strengthens their sense of identity.”
I would say teenagers are not the only souls whose sense of identity deserves to be bolstered by some solitary time. And it is easier than you may think to find isolation in 45 feet of space, my own teens are experts at it. Add movement to that healthy isolation, and you have a potent catalyst for thought. Did I have to abandon a stable career, shed most personal possessions, say a long goodbye to dear friends, and drag my family 10,000 miles across the Pacific to find this zone? Maybe. Has it been worth it? If that were the only benefit maybe/maybe not; but a sense of identity is not the only thing that’s been strengthened out here. On the whole it’s definitely been worth it so far.
xoxomo