A lot of time in modern life is spent looking down. Looking at phones, looking at the floor to avoid eye contact in public, performing everyday tasks requiring concentration, when feeling bad about something or deep in thought over a difficult topic, even reading a book sometimes (crazy, I know). Despite this predilection for downward staring, it's interesting how the language we use tends to frown on it. To say something or someone is 'looking down' suggests poor prospects. Calling someone a 'navel gazer' has negative connotations even if the expression's dictionary meaning - to be contemplative and detail-focused - is simply describing a personality type.
By contrast, the phrase 'look up' is a highly positive one. It describes both positive prospects and admiration. One could argue that this is related to nothing more than a general view of 'up' as good and 'down' as bad - I wonder whether this is psychologically rooted in our oldest ancestors being tree-dwellers, where being 'up' would have been safe and 'down', whether on the ground or falling, unsafe - but the implication of shifting one's gaze suggests specificity. Having recently conducted a thoroughly scientific experiment on the topic by, uh, looking up, my feeling is that we've been trying to tell ourselves something: looking up is wonderful.
My 'scientific experiment' was conducted in a park on a sunny London day. Yes, they happen. I hope that if lockdown brings anything positive to people's lives, it's an appreciation for the outdoors. So much time is spent shuffling between small, constructed spaces, closed off by walls of artificially straight lines, that it's easy to take for granted, or even resent, the space in-between.
One of the things I've most strongly objected to during this lockdown was the temporary closing of one of my local parks, Brockwell, at the height of the coronavirus crisis. In large part this was because the closure was based on police dishonesty, using a suspect figure to wrongfully imply people were behaving irresponsibly, but it was also because of the cruelty of robbing citizens of their green outdoors space, even temporarily, when so many London residents (especially those with children) live in cooped-up conditions with no gardens and little by way of a view.
Anyway, I was wondering around that very park, doing nothing but enjoying the fresh air and the sight of nature, when I found myself staring at the treetops. I'm not sure how or why, but on a path I've walked countless times before, some part of my subconscious decided to look at it from a different view. I'm not going to pretend it was a life-changing experience or go on a hippy-ish blather about connections between nature and the human soul, man, but it was remarkable how, for a short time, it changed the way I looked at my surroundings.
Whether looking down or across the horizon, the world is seen in generalities. A tree, a person, a dog, some flowers. It can be beautiful and enriching, but is unspecific in the details. I spoke about heuristics in a previous post, which is to say the mental shortcuts we take to function efficiently as human beings. In that post, I was discussing the role heuristics play in our mental processing of data and how those processes can be hijacked by an excess of information. I wonder if, in a different sense, that is what is happening when we see things from our standard, horizontal perspective. The world is so full of visual detail that to process all of it would drive us mad, yet in forming those shortcuts, we've become blind to the joyful specificity of the world around us.
Looking at the treetops from below, I ceased looking at the trees simply as trees, but at the individual detail of each tree. The shape of the branches and the leaves, the sunlight breaking through the cracks of the lightly dancing foliage, it brought a sense of calm and appreciation of a kind of beauty too small and precise to normally catch the eye. This translated for a while as my gaze returned to its natural horizontal state. The grooves in tree bark, the shape and colour of individual flowers in their beds, the intricate details of the clock in the park's centre. On my way home, even the city took on a new shape. Even the most uninteresting building from a horizontal perspective had something to offer with an upward tilt of the head, revealing hidden architecture and giving new life to old details and objects.
By looking up, a considerable amount of detail is eliminated from one's standard view, subtly encouraging the appreciation of that which remains when the background is simply the sky. Looking down serves a similar purpose, although with the ground rarely offering much by way of beauty, it is more useful for focusing one's attention inward: hence, one imagines, the aforementioned term 'navel gazer' for a deep thinker.
I wonder if there is a biological or psychological root in the benefits of looking up. In meditation, turning one's eyeballs upwards is thought to induce a state of relaxation. When entering a large, impressive space, such as a cathedral, I have often found my gaze shifting upward towards the ceiling. Looking up at the clouds is a cliché for depicting someone in a relaxed, thoughtful state. I can't say whether there's a provable basis for an upward stare being beneficial, particularly when staring out across the open ocean or a vast open landscape confers similar self-reflection. Perhaps whether from sideways or below, we naturally yearn for the sky, and perhaps its association with God, to expand our imaginations. In these times of smartphones and quarantines, though, taking a new perspective and appreciation for the beauty unseen in front of our eyes can only be a good thing.
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