Looking Out The Window: A Wonderful Exercise In Reflection And Introspection
Looking out the window, letting your gaze hanging beyond a window pane is not synonymous with wasting time. Because sometimes, the one who looks beyond this threshold does not seek to see the outside world. He / she simply wants to cross his / her reflection to navigate through the floods of introspection and reach inner worlds in search of new possibilities. In reality, there are few mental exercises that can be healthier than this one.
Anyone who knows the work of Edward Hopper will no doubt remember all those works in which he presents us with a woman alone in front of a window. Sometimes it’s a window in a hotel room, next to a bed, in a café… The image is always the same: a feminine gaze that seems to transcend the glass and be miles away. away from this small space that surrounds it.
Few puzzles have aroused such pictorial interest. What are these women looking at? The answer is simple: nothing and everything at the same time. Hopper was an expert when it came to creating moods and atmospheres to convey difficult-to-define emotions to us. The light, the shapes, the colors, everything had to lead to a determined sensation. He therefore often had recourse to a window next to his characters.
Windows are thresholds for the human mind. They are often this essential resource for any dreamer. Or for that person who needs a rest after a stressful day and who leans his head against the icy glass of a window in the subway. It is at this moment that the gaze relaxes and our imagination kicks in. At this moment, we start to daydream and our brain finally finds relief, freedom, well-being.
Looking out the window, an introspection exercise
In any elementary or secondary school classroom, it’s easy to find a child looking out the window. They are absent, disconnected from the world around them but have established a link with their ramblings, their dreams. As we grow older, this behavior, far from correcting itself, furiously persists. However, he continues to be frowned upon. Because looking out the window is synonymous with unproductiveness, it means not being present in the immediacy that surrounds us, in the responsibilities that await us.
Let’s face it: we are rarely allowed to dive into our mental states to find out what is happening there. Because whoever acts in this way remains motionless, generates nothing, demonstrates nothing. And this, in a results-oriented society, is nothing but sacrilege. Perhaps that is why looking out the window is an exercise we prefer to do when we are alone. It is a question of setting the eyes on this limit fixed by the glass to watch (and not see) what is happening in the outside world.
It’s like a reverse trip. What there is outside does not interest us because we already know everything about the hustle and bustle that takes place there: traffic, people walking, city moving in the same routine … Our brain pulls us like this. anchor that we lift from the bottom of the depths to make us plunge into the sea. There, something wonderful and useful to our emotional and psychological development takes place.
We live in a world obsessed with productivity, we know that. Perhaps this is why we have forgotten the enormous potential that lies in the act of daydreaming. Sometimes the most important things, the essential decisions arise in front of a window. It’s almost like a rebellion of our mind that orders us to do something different. It is about making contact with our wisest “me” – but the best hidden – to listen to what he has to say to us.
The window that allows daydreaming
Psychologists who are experts in the world of creativity such as Scott Barry Kaufman and Jerome L. Singer tell us in a Psychology Today article that daydreaming today is little more than a stigma. Anyone who chooses to look out the window for half an hour instead of continuing to work on their computer is nothing but a lazy person.
What’s more, in a study by these same psychologists, it was shown that 80% of managers in companies like Adobe believe that creativity is enhanced by hard work and continuous activity. Thus, the worker who, at some point, chooses to go for a coffee in front of a window is someone who cannot stand the pressure, someone unproductive.
Today, we continue to associate movement with yield and passivity with laziness. So we have to change these views, these rusty ideas. Dreaming awake is the art of going in search of wonders hidden in our brain. It is training our mind to develop it a little more through introspection, curiosity, symbolism and imagination.
All this, all this potential hidden in each of us can easily be found in front of a window. Looking out the window at some time of the day means making an appointment with ourselves and stepping through the threshold of this inner world that we often overlook. This world we don’t take care of because the outside demands too much from us. Today’s society wants us to be hyper-connected and receptive to endless stimuli.
Therefore, let’s learn to set limits for ourselves and join this pane from time to time. Let us allow ourselves to go and see this reflection which contains our dreams, this place from which we can distinguish our inner beauties and this world full of infinite possibilities …
Our thoughts Dali’s method, based on the hypnagogic state, sought to transcend the world of reason to catch the dream, make it his own and transfer it …
