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I've been thinking a lot lately about perception. This line of thought was ignited by a read of Anathem and partly by an article in Wired on "the neuroscience of magic." It's a long-term area of interest for me, though, as evidenced by a few of the poems I wrote as an undergrad, and my constant affection for Robert Anton Wilson and his body of work.

One of the exercises I occasionally indulge in while driving, is putting my attention spot in a location, then stretching back to connect myself to that point, exploring the distance between. It's a direct result of an exercise that Jayson Lockwood suggested to me, back at a time when my emotional state was so tangled up that I felt lost and overwhelmed. I've shared it with a few people since, and it's a simple exercise to implement. Stand in the middle of a room. Look forward to the wall, and measure your sense of distance to it. Step forward to reach it, a step at a time, and put your hands on the wall. Push against it, and feel the resistance. Return to the center of the room, and do the same thing for the other four sides.

The first time I completed that exercise, it was like my world un-crushed. I had been living in this world where depth was incidental; I saw the world flat, like a television screen. The artifice of narrowed vision, of intent focus, had me jump from one thing to the next without seeing the true distance between. It was oppressive, this world dominated by objects, and I felt trapped by it. And there was such a sense of relief when I did this: there was much more space for me to exist in, in a world that had depth to it.

It happens still: from point to point, I navigate through my life by one object of interest or another, marking street signs and landmarks as I make my journey to and from work, identifying the remote control and the television screen. I wind my way through a landscape of concepts that I have labeled, and I do not see beyond those labels. So every once in a while, I look at something, and I calculate its distance to me, observe the things between me and it, send my attention out roving to explore all those things and places. What I see in these journeys is sometimes surprising, sometimes beautiful, and sometimes fairly mundane. The fact of observing, though, of seeing these things that a directed attention would ordinarily look past, is pleasurable. It feels like my spirit has been set free to roam, and in those moments, I feel a sense of fascination with and involvement in the world around me. It's not a cure for the stresses of my life, but it is a relief, of sorts. It's just a pause to smell the roses, so to speak.