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Express Yourself
The Art of Staring Into Space
Creativity happens when you find the courage to do absolutely nothing
I spent much of my time in school staring out of windows. In class, I only had to glance at the birds wheeling in the sky and I would be lost for a minute, two, 10, 20… until my teachers yelled at me for daydreaming and broke the spell.
But I wasn’t daydreaming. Dreaming implies dreams. It implies content. But I wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. I was just staring out the window into space.
My teachers would sometimes ask me, “What’s so interesting outside the window?” I never could give a good answer. I wasn’t really looking at anything. So I usually shrugged, mumbled an apology, and tried to focus again on my schoolwork.
After a few minutes, inevitably, my mind wandered again, my pen lifted from the page, I looked out of the window, and…
I used to be so good at staring into space. I was an expert. World-class. But school trained me out of it.
By the time I hit my twenties, I had lost the ability to get absorbed in the not-quite-nothing there in the middle distance. I had internalized the disapproval of my teachers, so if I caught myself in the act, I would stop and remind myself to concentrate.
You go to school to make the expectations of culture your own. By the time you leave, you take that culture for granted. From my schooling, I learned that people who want to be productive, people who want to get things done, don’t spend hours staring out the window.
I used to be so good at staring into space. I was an expert. World class. But school trained me out of it.
Like whittling sticks and chewing on stems of grass, the art of staring into space belonged to a different era. It had no value in the modern world.
It was the medieval Chinese writer, Liu Xie, who convinced me that my teachers were wrong.
I stumbled across Liu’s book about the art of writing, Creative Minds and Carved Dragons, a decade-and-a-half ago by accident in a second-hand bookstore in the north of England…
