The practice of looking up

Last week, things were feeling tight. Part of my discomfort was that I had a computer heavy week with very little output. This is perhaps funny as one of the projects that I was working on was the Art of Rest, which is starting in the Sanctuary this coming weekend.

Despite the research that I was reading on the importance of  rest as a means of productivity, I kept pushing through for hours on end. This strategy was a complete contrast between what the research was declaring as an effective approach to work and my method. Less time = more focus vs long days= mind numbing toil. Oh the irony!

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, author of the book “Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less” explains that if we look to history, we see that some of the world’s greatest thinkers all had what we would consider short work days. Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Henri Poincaré, Maya Angelou, Stephen King,  and Ernest Hemingway prioritised rest and ended their work day after only 4 hours. As I read these words, I could feel an internal (and indignant!) shout:

 ‘Yes! Yes! And Yes!’

Yet still, after 7 hours and counting, I stared at the computer uninspired and drained of energy.

Feeling exhausted, I decided to get up and move around a bit. The fire needed a new log and I would go out to the shed and fill the wood basket. As I stepped outside, the cool air hitting my face was an invitation to look up.

And there it was… this vast and expansive sky.

Immediately , my eyes relaxed and I felt compelled to let out a sigh. I could feel my shoulders drop, my mind unwind and a smile slowly form. I took another deep breath and the hours of focused attention that had been building as tension in my body began to evaporate.

This one act of looking up facilitated a profound felt sense of stepping back into inspiration. Physically, the view was much greater and mentally I could start to feel a loosening up of my thinking mind. It felt like relief. Once thoughts started to unravel, I was beginning  to have some clarity and even started to reflect on the connections between the research that I was doing, the act of looking up and my mindfulness practice.

For instance, this looking up business reminded me of the process in meditation where there is a move from focussed attention on a support to an opening up to awareness of all that is happening around and within you. It’s in this opening up that a feeling of expansiveness can arise and “knowing what is happening while it is happening, no matter what it is” becomes more clear. (This is the definition of mindfulness given by the renowned meditation teacher, Rob Nairn). Moreover, as I was already working at the computer, I decided to google the words ‘looking up’ for fun and see what I could find.

To my surprise, the practice of looking up is actually a thing. Not only is it a thing, but there appears to be a movement formed around the practice of looking up and looking out. I even found a report on the “Art and Science of Looking up”, written by the neuroscientist Dr. Fiona Kerr. Simply put, looking up helps move us into our natural cognitive state of daydreaming mode. To me the name ‘daydream’ has an ethereal connotation, but it is much more multifaceted. Kerr (2019) states that “when we are not distracting our brains with technology or pushing them down the rabbit hole of trying to work on a specific task or problem, we enter a daydreaming state called abstraction, where we begin to think in a different, more complex way”. And it’s in this different and complex way of thinking that we start to experience insights and have ‘A-HA’ moments. This is exactly what had happened to me as I went outside for more wood and I looked up.

Once I read this, I decided to turn my computer off. After all, everything that I was reading was confirming the fact that not only did I need to rest, but if I did rest, work might become easier. In that moment, I decided to join this revolution of rest and looking up in a bid to work smarter, not harder.

So, if you are feeling spent from sitting in front of a computer for hours on end, or from a day of meetings, or from working on a school assignment, go outside and look up! Or, maybe it’s that you have spent an entire afternoon ruminating on a problem. Again, go outside and look up! This is my invitation to you for the week. Can we all try to break up our days of work with a few trips outside to look up?

Perhaps you would like to join me at the Sanctuary community meditation sit on Tuesday at 10am. I will be leading a practice where we spend a bit of time noticing what it is like to make this transition from focussed attention to open awareness. I would love to see you there.

-Jane

Click here to join me at the Sanctuary’s online meditation session on Tuesday morning at 10am

To download or listen to an audio of a short meditation called Looking Up, click below