My head in the clouds

Lately I have had my head in the clouds as the expression goes though perhaps not in the traditional meaning of the phrase. I haven’t been feeling flighty or guided by whim and fancy. I’ve simply been spending time watching clouds go by while floating in a pool or flat-out on the beach. I can spend over an hour doing just that and ironically it never feels like a waste of time. Quite the contrary.

It would be safe to say that most if not all people have at some point in their lives felt the sensation of time slipping away from them. At the very least there is this subconscious feeling that time passes by and once passed can never be retrieved. Worse still is knowing that this passing time, much like the sand in an hour-glass, is not only finite but of unknown duration. In other words we do not know how many grains of sand are left in our own hour-glass.

To this end, humans have devised so-called time-saving gadgets for centuries. The term “time-saving” is amusing because while no one questions it I would venture a guess that no one actually believes that “time” can in fact be “saved”. The consensus is that such devices simply allow us to spend less time doing a particular task thus allowing us more time to do something else. The irony of course is that despite the fact that in the Western world we have reached a point where many people have accumulated a number of such devices, the most common complaint I hear is: “I just don’t have the time”. Perhaps it is the barrage of information at our disposal that creates an appearance of endless tasks that need doing. There might be over one thousand unread feeds in my RSS reader, over three hundred status updates on Facebook, more than sixty unread email, over one hundred Flickr updates from my contacts. In the past week I may have tagged over fifty inspirational web sites that need to be absorbed so that I might create something of my own. My Twitter feed offers a constant stream of links and messages and since I’ve picked who I follow, I know they are all interesting. And there is also work and chores and family and friends and gallery openings and films and hobbies and books and a to-do list that grows more than it shrinks.

And then, there are clouds wafting by, uncaring about all the things I must get done, unmoved by anything other than the winds to which they yield gently and without effort.

Mental images form in the mind of how the world should be, how my life should unfold, how my photography should evolve. The stream of thoughts is endless with each thought having its own sense of urgency creating in turn a sense of anxiety. Everything changes all of the time and I have to keep up; I must make the most of this life which is all too short.

But then there are clouds and they tell me a different story. They are born out of nothingness and eventually return to nothingness, ever-changing along the way and yet always remaining the same.

It is true that nothing in life is permanent, after all, transitoriness is a characteristic of the universe  but it is also true that any anxiety I may have regarding this impermanence is only a characteristic of the mind. The fear I feel about not having time, about life being too short is not caused by the apparent passage of time; the fear and the anxiety exist because I try desperately to keep them at bay. I try to do so by keeping ever so busy in the hope that these thoughts of fear and anxiety will be drowned out. I am desperate not to waste a second of this precious life but only end up feeling like time is accelerating at an unsustainable pace and so the underlying feeling of anxiety and fear becomes the foundation to all other thoughts.

In the realm of creativity this foundation built of anxiety will most likely prevent any creative thought from settling long enough to be noticed. The mental structure is simply too unstable and volatile. Creativity holds no preferences or biases towards any particular art form or artist and if it doesn’t find a foothold where its presence is felt it will simply flow on to another. It flows, coming and going, going and coming, seeking nothing except perhaps an avenue of expression. So in order to become this avenue for expression I must provide a better foothold and to do so I must rest and find stillness but doing so proves difficult because the effort of trying to achieve this stillness only results in restlessness.

Watching clouds go by, however, presents a possible solution to this apparent conflict.

The trouble with thoughts is that they come uninvited, some are useful, most are not. Consciously trying to block them is exhausting, time-consuming and usually only adds to the underlying feeling of anxiety. As it states in the Hsin Hsin Ming, “When you try to stop activity to achieve passivity your very effort fills you with activity.” So instead of trying to force the mind to silence I watch the thoughts as if they were clouds. I watch them without attachment, without judgement and eventually thoughts appear in the silence and dissolve back into the silence. Much like clouds tend to do. Thoughts don’t stop appearing, at least not for me but eventually they stop taking up residence and simply yield to the breeze blowing in from the void and my anxiety which may still be there, is bolstered up with peace which makes for a more stable foundation on which creativity can flourish.

I am not wanting to suggest that this passivity is easily achieved but I would suggest that it can only be achieved without effort. That statement probably makes no sense but I have no other way to explain it. Also I am not suggesting that any of this applies to anyone else. I am not presenting this as some sort of self-help answer to anything. Like everything else I write about on this blog, this should only be seen as an experience shared. I am well aware that for some people anxiety, fear, anger or even depression can fuel their creativity. However, in such cases, perhaps those people who have such traits don’t actually feel anxious or fearful about what ails them. I remember over-hearing someone once say about depression, “I do not suffer from depression, I use it. Creatively. I guess I am lucky that way.” Back then I didn’t understand what he might have meant by this and I won’t pretend now that I am any wiser but perhaps this person did not feel anxious about his mental condition. Perhaps he knew how to be still within the chaos of his own mind. Perhaps, he simply understood clouds.

Of space and time

Once upon a time
I thought art was a waste of space.
Later, when I tried in vain to create my own,
I came to think it was a waste of time.
Now that I’m older
and care much less about what I think,
I spend all my time
seeing art in every space.