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| Still Life With Chessboard (The Five Senses) by Lubin Baugin, 1630 |
There's a game
I used to play with friends, when I had the kind of unstructured time to
lollygag around and invent these kinds of diversions. I wish I had a nifty name
for it but I'll just call it the sensory inventory. For me, it started in
Bestor Plaza at Chautauqua Institution (where I spent my summers as a kid), but
you can do it anywhere.
Simply sit
still for a few minutes, and inventory everything you observe, sense by sense. You
can do this out loud with a friend or alone in your journal. Priscilla Long
suggests some very similar exercises in her excellent book The Writer’sPortable Mentor: A guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life.
Sight
I think most
of us with decent eyesight tend to rely too much on just seeing. Still, it's a
good one to start with. Look around you – without purpose. Try to see
everything just as it is. Don't be afraid to stare. Point (if it won't get you
into trouble). Really study what you see. Be aware of your peripheral vision
too. What impression do the things at the very fringes of your vision make?
What attracts your eye? Color? Movement? How do sounds or smells interact with
what you’re seeing, or direct what you look at?
Hearing
Now listen. We
are constantly surrounded by sound. Inside there’s the hum of the refrigerator,
the whine of the desk lamp, the whir of the computer fan. I live within 20
minutes of an airport and near a highway, so our neighborhood is filled with sound.
Flight patterns that change according to wind direction, and the ebb and flow
of traffic throughout the day. If I can’t sleep, I listen. Sometimes, a local
owl calls wistful “who whos” against the whir of sparse late-night traffic. For
a moment those sounds will be covered by the hectic whine of a motorcycle
winding up on the now open road.
Smell
Next time you
visit a friend or neighbor’s house; try to parse the different smells. Do they
cook different food? Keep their doors and windows tightly shut up or wide open?
Can you smell the wisteria that grows just beyond their back porch?
I take my kids
to horse camp one week every summer. Coming and going, I consciously try to
parse and inventory the smells (and sights and sounds, of course). This served
me well when I wrote "The Horses." It's not just manure and horse sweat, there's
the smell of straw heated by the sun and the super fine dust (pulverized by so
many hooves) that coats everything, including the inside of your nose. Because
there's so many kids around, the horses get fed loads of carrots and you can
smell it on their breath. (Do you think of the color orange when you smell
carrots? I do.)
(tip - if your
trying to get better at smelling, open your mouth too, you smell with your
tongue as well as your nose)
Taste
Eat slowly
(it's better for your digestion anyway). If you’re eating food that you didn't
cook, try to identify the ingredients that went into it. I remember having some
chicken wings at a kid’s party and being pleased to identify white pepper in
the rub (the cook was pleased with my observation, too). Offer your guesses to
the cook or your fellow diners for comparison. People love talking about food.
Touch
If you see
something that fascinates you and you can, touch it. What materials is it made
of? Is it warm or cold? Think about the differences between similar materials.
Does the wooden salad bowl feel different than the wooden railing on the porch?
How does holding different materials make you feel? For example, the feel of a
plastic bottle verses a tall glass in your hand.
Then there’s
the human touch. Simply shaking hands gives you a world of information about a
person in a touch that lasts only a few seconds. Think about all the people
you've shaken hands with, and how different each hand, coarse and warm, soft
and small, or so old and frail that you are afraid to apply any pressure,
choosing instead to make a gentle sandwich, holding that person's hand lightly
between both of yours.
Don’t Forget
to Observe Yourself
Think a little
bit about your observational biases and preferences. Do you key in on how
people drive, or what kind of car they have? When you are talking with someone,
are you most struck by what they’re wearing or the verbal tick they keep
repeating like some personal catch phrase? Do you notice the animals in your
neighborhood? Is it the stray cats and people with their dogs, or the family of
crows that always seem to be arguing in the tree outside your kitchen window?
Do you kill any spider you find in your house, or let them be in hope that
they'll kill the mosquitoes that find their way inside?
Think about
how your emotions might effect your perception. How do you feel about a cold
rainy day when you have to stand at the bus stop in the weather to get to work?
How do you feel about that same weather on a day when you don't have anything
pressing to do and can curl up under a blanket and read a novel? Emotions
can color what we perceive or vice versa. How does a windy, sunny day affect
our mood, compared with a windless day when the sky is blanketed with soft gray
clouds?
Mindful
observation is its own reward. Before long, you will find that you are noticing
more and more all the time. And, of
course, it also pays off when you’re in front of a blank page and have to
create a lived experience for the story you want to tell.
Don’t forget
to stay in the moment. Try not to be distracted with thoughts about how you
might use the moment in some future piece of writing (even if you set
out to have an experience as research for a particular story –a particularly
fun excuse to try something new IMO). You're going to trust your memory to that; this is all about
filling up the well.
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