Working Out The Lingering Muscle
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The Final Edit is a non-timely dispatch containing my findings from experiencing a life in the digital age. A lot of these musings are birthed from a state of flux, sometimes stagnation, curiosity, or concern over the technologically dominant daily life and the complex reality of coming to terms with all of the above. This particular letter is a victory sigh of figuring out why and what one needs to be enchanted again. It’s a road map for a mind to be reverted to a state of wonder. The steps are easy but they require constant refreshing. Read this during the middle of your day, when the optimism of a fresh start is wearing off and the doom of your things-to-do is settling in.
This past month I spent 9 days in Italy, my first time in the country. Apart from feeling very much at home in the land while satisfying my appetite for food and beauty, I also tried to train a muscle that seemed to have atrophied. The lingering muscle.
L- MUSCLE
I could have started this exercise before travelling and warmed up at home, but I took on the challenge of being tested in a high risk environment. The risk of ‘losing out’.
Lingering is the ability to simply allow the natural motion and momentum of time and space to carry you, without exerting pressure on either. Lingering combined with precise attention is enchantment. While lingering sounds easy to do (almost like doing nothing at all) it’s challenging in practice. It requires the subtraction of self induced distraction (screens) or deviating from the moment by being non-present. For this amateur lingerer, or lingeree in training (me), an end was needed, a nudge in a specific direction. A topic if you will. I tried to exercise this muscle in a specific environment of high stimulus and sensory load— the museum.
When I set foot in Italy, I felt a pressing obligation to absorb, digest and recall all the history and art this place had to offer. It was overwhelming yes, but I also felt a sense of inadequacy at the prospect of me failing to; absorb, digest and recall. I felt as if I was not of a certain intellectual calibre if I didn’t do these things the right way. Happy to report that not much after, I decided against associating myself with intellectuality or any such depressing label. I noticed my egoic sense of self trying to pull me into what it thought I needed to be: cultured, analytical, critical. But after much back and forth, I was able to escape from that ego trick and was reaffirmed that indeed I may be a thinking body, but I’m a feeling body first.
And such was the motto of the rest of my trip…feeling and then thinking.
emotion first, analysis later
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in one of his letters, which I highly, highly recommend you read after this, wrote a line which I have found myself whispering at different times of the day. While filling my water bottle, while reading the news, while making judgements…. and that line is: “thinking, the basic unit of intentionality”. The delusional promise of optimising not only ourselves but our attention into activities that could churn more output, inevitably makes us lose out on not only that time, but degrades our attention quality. Or our attention endurance. The unit of our intentionality is measured by our wilful thoughts. And thoughts come after contributing attention. Attention is refined by feeling.
- Onto attention. How common or frequent has the term “disenchanted/jaded/disillusioned” become? I think sufficiently. In fact, I find that these were the few terms that were able to capture my disposition for the better half of the past decade. I also found people around me echoing these words, as more and more of them found themselves at the periphery of what a reasonable world should feel like.
wrote about the opposite of this term being “enchantment”. His premise being: what if enchantment is simply a measure of the quality of our attention? He writes, “One of these strategies is “to hone sensory receptivity to the marvellous specificity of things.” This idea that by waiting on the world we allow ourselves to be drawn in, is fascinating and simple. By strategically applying patience and attention, we can allow our consciousness to be stretched wide and deep, just like a muscle. And in this way, our attention becomes relational because we can yield more from it and with it, contrary to a more stagnant, non-erotic concept of simply witnessing information. I mean we do pay attention, so what are we getting out of this transaction if not an expansion of our embodied presence?
3. When I entered the first museum, I defensively decided against being overwhelmed. This refusal was more of an affirmation waiting to be manifested rather than a simple directive. I took in the sensory load around me, processed the sounds and materials I was walking through, zoomed out of my body and chose to recenter in a way that sorted my externals in a doable manner. The method to execute this recipe for enchantment was to pick a theme for my observations: I chose postures. From Boticelli to Gioto, Da Vinci to Raphael, Michelangelo to Bernini—my eyes only focused on singular, anatomic details…bodies. I became infected with the details of hands, feet, necks, ankles, limbs. Below is a carousel of what my eyes saw and my mind processed.
What happened when I shifted my gaze from the whole to the parts? I was able to hone in on my ability to process and analyse stimulus that otherwise may have dissolved my stamina. The feeling of achieving a state of refined consciousness by focusing on detail is something I discovered after my trips to the museums. The self imposed expectation to ingest my subject of attention in its entirety, would have previously left me in a state of paralysing overwhelm. I may still fall prey to such maladies (…expectations), but I found a technique to circumvent most of that mess. I was able to remember details of what enchanted me, the sensory impression of my reaction and most importantly, I ended up looking back at the photos with equal if not heightened wonder. The nutritional value of our attention is unique to each feeling body. The formula is not prescriptive, but the approach can be systematic. You don’t need to be in a museum to take this lingering muscle for a drive, you can start where you are. I took 2 months to exercise this muscle through the lens of fashion. I will share more about that in @studioreflections in a part II of this letter.
Till then,
Stay enchanted
FROM THE MAG:
Playlist for some contemplation, a deep think or just a regular moment:
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