On Forgetting to Day Dream

The open mic scene in Mumbai emerged around 2006. It was the perfect time to be a performance poet. We had excellent venues, good jazz and an audience. There was tons of creativity. We were dreamers, entertainers, burning with passion, we were pioneers.

I was composing poems in my head. My train ride to work took 45 minutes — just about enough time to get that one true sentence, as Hemingway put it, with the follow throughs. Boom boom boom, the sentences fit and a poem would start to take shape. The window would turn inwards, the city would become more personal. The shared experience would fade away for the time I was in my head. Transit was always exciting, because I wasn’t always sure of where I would end up. Some times I’d intentionally let my train station pass only to let the poem run its course.

I remember I was the quintessential dreamer in school. I’d be sitting by the window, staring at clouds, believing I could get them to squeeze out rain with just the power of intention. On late August afternoons the clouds would often oblige the request of a ten year old boy.

Today things are different. We didn’t quite see it coming. We have high speed internet, smart phones and social media. We have Youtube, Netflix and no chill. None at all. Our minds are clogged with information and we can’t process it fast enough. We can’t help ourselves, we just go at it, greedy and addicted. And there is just no space left for quiet contemplation, day dreaming, and solitude. There are no windows to peer out of, only screens that suck us in. We willingly jump into these rabbit holes.

I’ve been reading Alan Lightman’s ‘In Praise of Wasting Time’, and there are passages that ring true.

She has difficulty being alone within her own mind because she has become addicted to constant external stimulation.

There was a time when rotary dial phones at home were literally placed on a pedestal. We took calls while standing up. There was a reverence attached to them. We are compelled now to constantly check our smartphones. We send out hundreds of messages a day and receive a hundred more. We are expected to respond to emails immediately. We confuse being alone with being lonely and we are lonelier even as our friends and followers grow — they are coming at us at a billion bits a second, and push us further and further away from ourselves.

I believe I have lost something of my inner self. By inner self, I mean that part of me that imagines, that dreams, that explores, that is constantly questioning who I am and what is important to me. My inner self is my true freedom.

Alan Lightman ponders on how the pace of life historically has been defined by the speed of communication. In ten years from 1995 to 2005, the speed of walking in 32 countries increased by 10%. That coincides with the emergence of the internet. To not have the time to think about what truly matters to us is a severe injustice — it is self inflicted. We forget to dream. And it’s in those dreams where the abstract fragments of our hopes, aspirations and fears come together. We are left incomplete.

My experience with this remote village on the other side of the planet reminds me of the two different words for time in ancient Greece: chronos and kairos. Chronos is clock time. (And the ancient Greeks did have crude clocks, called water clocks, in which time was measured by the flow of water.) Chronos is quantitative time. Chronos is sequential time. Chronos is the relentless time that marches on mindlessly in the external world, oblivious to the lives of human beings. Kairos, on the other hand, is time created by events, often human events. It might be the opportune moment to take action. Kairos is not necessarily measurable in minutes and hours. It might be the duration of a season, or of a meal, or of a love affair. When an event of human significance occurs, it occupies a great deal of kairos. When insignificant, its kairos might be nothing at all. Kairos time is forever. It is the time of memory. It is the time of being.

I’m Indian, time is more Kairos for us, but we are hurtling up the Chronos curve. I think I got pulled into the attention economy in 2011 when I realised I needed a keyboard to think. I’m hoping this is a bell curve for me. I’ll now share how I’m trying to turn the clock around. Maybe these tricks (and that’s what they are right now) will work for you too.

20 Minutes of Solitude

I’ve started meditating everyday. It’s the kind where you watch thoughts pass by while resting your attention on your breath. It’s very calming. Time slows down. It kind of defragments my brain and helps me identify and accept my priorities. But if meditation is not your thing, there are other ways to explore solitude. It’s critical to unplug. So take a walk or sit by yourself and just watch your thoughts and prime your mind.

Get used to Pen and Paper

I carry a notebook around where I record passing ideas, interesting observations, quotes and conversations. These are snippets and I often forget the context when I go back to them a few weeks later. The purpose of the notebook is two fold — to be more present in the real world and to serve as fodder for musings. It encourages me to imagine, or remember everyday.

Schedule, but don’t Over-schedule

My notebook, a travel journal, has an insert for daily planning. It’s a way-finder — a map of my time. If I stray into Facebook for too long, I know how to get back on track. One header in my planner is dedicated to personal creative projects — story research, weekly sketches, things to think about. Depending on the day, the time allocated to these musings ranges from 20 to 60 minutes, often achieved in transit.

The problem with checklists is that we overestimate the amount of things we can get done in a day. Catch 22, when you do all those 20 things, you’ve done too much and clogged your mental bandwidth. When you have not checked some of your todos, you’ve piled them up for the next day and pushed your me-time further. So optimise your schedule — do just six to seven important and/or urgent things. There are some excellent systems out there. The Eisenhower Matrix is great, ABCDE is superb, as is the One Big Thing (my current favourite method). And factor in some time for yourself.

Know what’s Sacrosanct

My time with my family is sacrosanct. I don’t want to do my own thing when I’m with them — I know that everything on my schedule is flexible, but 7 pm to 10 pm is all theirs. It’s easier now to figure where to fit me-time. So I wake up a couple of hours before everybody else and potter about — low involvement activity is great for pondering.

Turn off Notifications

I can’t stress how effective this little hack is. I did this a few months ago and now I often forget to check my messages. That’s fine — if it’s important folks will find a way to reach me. But mostly they are just interesting but unimportant tidbits of chat. Out of sight or hearing range is out of mind. They can wait.

Read a Book

And it needs to be a book, not just posts or articles on a screen. It’s so rewarding to lose yourself in a good book. It builds perspective. While I read a lot, I think I read too much. I tend to chain read on my Kindle. So now whenever I get done with a book, I take a day off from my Kindle to record my thoughts on the book. This helps me glean more and it feeds my imagination.

I’m not writing poetry yet. Maybe that time has passed, or maybe it’ll come back some day. That’s okay too. What’s important is that I’ve cleared the ground for it. Maybe something will emerge the way those clouds gathered all those years ago and left trails of rain drops on my window.

Mental downtime is having the space and freedom to wander about the vast hallways of memory and contemplate who we are. Downtime is when we can ponder our past and imagine our future. Downtime is when we can repair our selves.

I’m keen to know how you find your downtime. Do leave your thoughts here or drop by @BigFatBooks on Instagram.