Writer Wander 013 - The Lost Art of Zoning Out

Getting lost is kind of rad, actually.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:24

This is Rider Wander, and it is the thirteenth episode of Rider Wander. I'm currently sitting in my car waiting to get to an event, and I arrived a few minutes early, and I'm watching as little droplets of rain fall along the glass of the windows of my car. And that's made me think about different moments in my life where I have allowed myself to get zoned out, right? To get zoned out. And how I feel that the older I get, the less opportunities I have to zone out. And how I think that that in some senses is probably been detrimental to my own well-being in some regard, right? But what am I what am I talking about when I mean like zoning out, right? Well, it's probably you probably know what I'm talking about just by talking about it, right? It's like any moment in which you are relaxed, you're not really thinking of anything, and you're just focused on the present moment, and you know, you might usually in these kind of moments, something that helps to sustain it is to have an anchor for your attention, right? The one that we're looking at right now, for example, are the the raindrops that are slowly sliding down the window of my car. But there are other examples. One of my favorite ones is that uh where I come from at least uh I come from a place where typically the roofs of our houses are are are in cement, right? So oftentimes I'll look at the roof of my house, and maybe this is a little difficult to describe for for somebody who comes from a place where the houses are made of wood, but when you look up at the roof, you can see like little dots and little valleys and little crevices that form on the over the exterior of the wall, right? And what's really interesting about this, well, I guess for for all intents and purposes, guys, I I'm giving a dissertation on why watching paint dry on a wall is cool, okay? But this is cooler than watching paint dry because at least it's it's a little more riveting, and I think it involves the imagination to tad more. But in the kind of roof that I'm talking about, what's really cool about that kind of roof is that you can see like all these little dots, all these little crevices, and and all these little formations, and you know, if you're a little kid and you're like sta uh you're you're lying down on your bed and you're you're looking up at your roof and you're you're squinting really hard, like maybe you're just having a very lazy day or something, you're squinting really hard at the roof, you can almost start like to make out like shapes from it, right? You can start to see like uh little faces form on the wall or or strange abstract patterns and formations that could be there or could just be the product of your overactive imagination, but either way, you appreciate seeing them nonetheless, right? And I guess it it's it's a thing where I'm not sure if it's so much my adulthood that is and my aging process that is preventing me from having moments like this, or if it's just the proliferation of the of the smartphone. I've never mentioned it on this podcast before, but despite being from Generation Z, I was a very late adopter of the smartphone. I didn't get a smartphone until I was in 10th grade, so in some regard, I was uh, you know, it took me a while to you know get to to have this thing on me at all times. And I feel that when you have a phone in your hand, especially a smartphone, it just gives you an excuse to not have moments like the one that I'm describing to you. It gives you an excuse to you know to go distract yourself with something that is on your phone, for instance, or watching a video, or reading an article, or listening to some kind of podcast like Ryder Wonder, but we're good, we're the good one, we're the good one. So you could be distracted to me all you want, right? But I really miss these moments, right? And I distinctly associate them with childhood. Maybe it's because my childhood was the factor, or maybe it's because for much of my childhood I simply did not have a smartphone device. I think another instance where this happens, and I think this is a more common experience to all listeners, is that I think we've all had a point in our lives, or at least I hope we've all had a point in our lives, where we just stare up at the at the sky and we just watch the clouds. That's like the most common version of this because you know clouds are clouds are cool. There's a lot of cool things about clouds. The first thing that's super cool about clouds is that I feel like clouds are the only thing in this world that are basically indistinguishable from the paintings in which it is depicted. What do I mean? What do I mean by this? Obviously, you have hyper-realistic paintings that whose aim is to try and depict uh down to the most minute detail every single aspect of a particular image, person, structure, or building or whatever. But I feel that when you have a painting that has to do with a person or with some castle or a building or or a landscape, it there's always a certain suspension of disbelief that is necessary, and I can always tell that it's it's an image, right? For me, at least, though, when I look at skyscapes, and when I look in particular at paintings of clouds, what's super cool about clouds is that I feel that due to the lack of detail on clouds, when you draw when you draw them and when you draw them in a realistic style, they quite literally look like a facsimile, and that's a that's a word that I probably need to define. Uh, facsimile is an amazing word, right? We should all learn cool words every single day. But facsimile is a very cool word because what it means is a copy of something that is not the original, but for all intents and purposes, has a one-to-one comparison to the original. That is to say, it is a perfect copy without a single blemish or error in its manufacturing. So it is exactly like it. So I feel that paintings of clouds are like facsimiles of clouds, and that that's just super that's just super cool to me, right? It feels you know, another tangent, it just it just feels like some sort of liminal space that I am simultaneously engaging with fiction and reality in a way that uh it isn't quite always available, but similar to what I had mentioned with the with the roof, with the clouds, you can stare at clouds for for hours, and you know, you can imagine shapes in them. You can see dinosaurs in clouds, or you can see hearts, and you know, you can see so many cool things in clouds. And I remember I have this amazing memory. It was so it was very weird at the time. I don't even know what motivated me to do this at the time, but I always look back on this memory fondly, and it's so simple. I used to spend a lot of time in my grandma's house, right? Um my my maternal grandmother's house, right? And I I did not quite enjoy it. I I came from you know, I came from a uh separated parents, and in the days that my mother had my charge, well, she wasn't quite comfortable leaving me uh with my my father's house outside of his allotted time, and what happened was that uh oftentimes I'd be forced to go to my maternal grandmother's side, and you know, nothing against her, it's just that I was always I was always bored out of my mind when I was there. There just there wasn't anything for me to do. Uh, you know, at the time I was more into playing video games than than reading, so in hindsight, if if I was the current version of myself with my current taste, I I probably would have brought a mass market paperback alongside with me or some other book with me. However, I didn't. Um, I needed video games, and at the time there were no consoles or any place to play video games in that place, so I went there to basically what it felt like to me to just rot for for hours on end, and I did not have fun. But one day, I suppose I was just that bored, I went out into the outside of that house. I and I I lay down on a little uh uh you know a tiled um how do you how do you call that? I think it's a portico or something, you know, a tiled area around my house, and I laid down and I stayed like up looking at the sky for hours, man. Just hours. It was like a moment that did not end, right? And you know, obviously there's that thing where when you're a kid, time feels like it flows a lot f um a lot slower than it than it actually does. So maybe I was just there for like two hours or an hour and a half, but for me it felt like I was there for twice that for like four hours, just like lying on my back, like looking at the clouds, you know. I don't even know what I had on my mind. I don't think I had anything on my mind. I think it was just a moment of like perfect bliss, a perfect moment of being in the moment, right? And even when I try to when I try to recreate those experiences now, I still have the the the problem of getting stuck in my own internal monologue, right? And you know, maybe it's just that I don't remember what things were important to me back when I was like I don't know seven or eight years old, but I don't remember having an internal monologue during that instance, it was just pure unadulterated moment, and that was awesome, that was very cool. And another thing that I also really like doing is that I like to often stare at you know blades of grass and you know fields of grass to just extend for very long, and when you when you squint hard enough, you can start seeing like little insects m running amok, like uh little little um uh little ants and and whatnot. And it's very interesting because from our perspective, right now I'm in a parking lot, right? And it's very common for parking lots to have like this um, you know, a dividing line between both sides of the parking uh in which there are trees planted, and around those trees, obviously, there's there's like a little bit of like a strip of ground around them. And what I find fascinating is just looking down there, and that just looks like such a tiny thing to us, but from the perspective of an ant traversing through that, that's like an entire world, an entire ecosystem, right? You know, I suppose that the same sense of scale that we often feel when we look out into the sky, and whether that causes hope in you or existential dread, you know, from the perspective of an ant, that is their reaction to like the parking lot of this church that I'm that I'm currently in, right? You know, it this you know their little world, their their ecosystem is like that thin strip of ground that is underneath the tree in the parking lot, and they obviously have no idea what a parking lot is, they just occasionally see like these these massive metallic um um contraptions that move in on occasion, and their world is is that like area of ground, and that is you know that is so that is so cool to me. Because I I I remember that um I wrote one kid's novel a while back, and in the intro of that kid's novel, one of the things that I wanted to evoke in that intro was this idea, and I don't know I don't I don't even think this imagery had any uh thematic significance to the novel. Maybe it does, I should probably reread it, but in the intro, I'm I'm describing how you know I'm trying to transition the reader, was presumably an eight-year-old or or 12-year-old child. I'm trying to, you know, transition them away from the real world into this fantastic world, and rather than portraying an image where we're zooming out of the earth, I'm portraying this image where it sort of zooms in on the small details in nature, and it zooms in on, say, a leaf, and from that leaf, uh a little drop of dew is forming and it's slowly sliding off the leaf, and the entire fantasy world that I developed for that children's novel is contained, is entirely contained within that little piece of dew, within that little dew that you know that's falling off of the of the leaf. And that is such a cool contrast to me because you have again playing with scale, you have this very this very tiny thing, this very tiny thing that expands, and that within it, if you search deep enough within it, you can find a universe of meaning, right? And I think that's also true of us as humans. I believe that the best experiences in our life are often the product of searching within within ourselves, and and that searching within ourselves can lead to to great discoveries that are just on par with any typical explorer. But those are today's music. Rider Wonder.