Coming Home – To Daylight

When you wake today you will wake to an important day in the calendar of Melinda. I mean, Victoria (I guess I AM the centre of my own universe but you possibly have a very different calendar!). I am celebrating because it’s Daylight Saving Time!!! Yet another of my many very favourite times of year. Just the anticipation of the day approaching is enough to bring a smile to my lips. I know there are others, far more vocal than me and with varying degrees of vehement opinion, who would rob me of this. Good sense has prevailed in 2022 and my sanity preserving day rolls around again. TODAY!!!

Year round I’m awake early. I sit up in bed and write and drink a cup of coffee. I’ve taken to listening to ABC Classic FM so that there isn’t any vacuous chatter to distract my thinking and I’m learning all about composers I had never heard of before changing to this station. Another sign of the ageing process perhaps? Now as I write I gaze out the open windows at the sunrise, for it seems the day has begun even before I wake up.

Ardley is a shrine to sunlight. It is built to collect as much of it as is possible every day in every season. It would collect more if I got around to washing the windows (that’s a separate issue I am yet to even think of addressing!)! When I do my morning yoga I literally do face and salute the sun. My workspace in the Eyrie is a glory of light. I am blessed with windows on three sides of the room and bathe in every moment of light the day has to offer. Lennie-cat follows and stretches out in swathes of sunny warmth. The dogs gaze out hopefully just waiting for their chance to run out into it.

I am a lover of seasons. I relish the symbols of each shift in the world around me. Swelling buds on bare trees tell me that Spring will come. Fading leaves tell me summer is nearly over and I feel a thrill at the promise of Autumn leaves on show. That first day in Spring when you can take off your jumper and bare your arms to the sun is a thrill incomparable to any other. Except, perhaps, for that first day in Autumn when you can put that jumper back on again and snuggle into the welcome warmth. Mmm, I do like that as well! Unfortunately I am the owner of skin that doesn’t quite match my enthusiasm for sunshine and so there is an uneasy truce between us. The sunscreen bottle on the bench is enormous and used unsparingly and I am the owner of an uncounted number of hats. My most recent acquisition would make Holly Golightly green with jealousy, I can’t wait to hide under it this summer. I will wear my hats and long sleeves (sometimes) and cover myself with sunscreen because I will not deny myself the right to soak up that glorious light. 

For many years I worked in spaces without windows. We would arrive in the morning gloom and down tools at the end of the day with no sense of the world turning. I remember walking out the door to be shocked by wet ground, unaware there had been rain during the day. Summer days when we would emerge blinking at the unaccustomed brightness and it would be a surprise to realise it was still light outside. I tried screen savers of sunshine and regular jaunts out from the bowels of the building for a walk in the middle of the day. This awfulness only intensified during the pandemic when I found myself working long days tucked away from sight and sound (not even wifi could reach us!) in a workspace underneath the hospital. I was working in an incredible team and we brought every ounce of energy we could generate to our efforts. We put posters on the wall and played music and laughed and cried. If you’ve ever experienced such sustained lack of light you will know that you can only go so far towards ameliorating the impact of the denial of sunshine. None of these attempts to inject daylight into our days could overcome the dulling effect of a complete lack of natural light. Smiling becomes an effort. That is no way to live!

This particular theory of attention is one articulated here by James Williams (former Google strategist) who describes different forms of attention in the context of light that facilitates our ability to see ie pay attention to something.

“If it is highlighted you can see it and know it for what it is”.

An even better description he uses to try and explain how this affects our ability to pay attention is to compare the onslaught of external noise and input onto our awareness to a ‘denial of service attack’. Usually used to describe the concerted attack on a computer system, it’s a relentless barrage of input designed to overwhelm something. In the case of our ability to pay attention it’s the ever increasing flow of noise and information and research and emails and tweets and websites and streaming services and trends and chatter and entertainment and ENOUGH ALREADY! 

I know this sensation he is describing! Don’t you??? It’s right there at the end of the day wondering what happened with all that time, the busyness that kept me frantically occupied but achieved nothing related to the purpose with which I first began the day. It’s in that moment of walking into the kitchen and wondering what it was I was there to get. It’s the panic I feel when I realise just how many emails are waiting for me to respond. It’s the anxiety that seems to linger after scrolling through social media. Painfully, it’s recognising that, despite constant work and effort, personal goals and dreams can be just as far away from achievement now as they had been thirty years before because I’ve been distracted by ‘should’, ‘could’ and ‘must’. Someone else was pulling strings and I was quick to dance to their tune. The impact is both subtle and now, increasingly, obvious. We just need to stop and look and we will see it clearly.

They’ve never done these things not because they haven’t had the opportunity to do so. It’s that there has always been another, more immediate alternative in their pocket for them to turn their attention to (handover their focus to, I nearly wrote…). Even when we were more able to police strict screen access the time they did have away from screens was filled with counting down how long it would be until they could pick them up again. I’d like to suggest that that in itself is a type of focused attention… but cultivating the precious skill of day dreaming it clearly is not. It is the key failing I hold as a parent, this inability of my children to let their minds wander and to enjoy it. To seek it out. They do not know what they are missing. That’s the tragedy of it. Still, if those gorgeous kidults happen to have read this far… it’s not too late to learn. Seriously, give it a try. You might just find you like it!

You know as well as I do, in the absence of light, you are more likely to have a nightmare than a day dream. I will never allow myself to spend extended time in spaces without windows ever again. Daylight Saving Time is a celebration of the critical need for light, both literal and theoretical. It’s a way of playing with the rigidity of clock based time to allow us to move with the sun. Up with the dawn, to bed with waning light at dusk. This year I am determined to live in the light and that also means time away from my screens. All notifications have been turned off. I leave my phone behind when I walk and garden and when I cook in the kitchen I am listening to music. When I read I pick up a physical book and open it at the bookmark waiting within. I’ve scheduled time for emails and social media, in the morning when there is sufficient daylight to allow me to remember who I am and have perspective about what I see on those sites.

I’m excited again at possibility. I gaze across the property with an eager eye to pinpoint picnic spots or possible planting sites or just a shady nook that would take my blanket for a quiet read. I rearrange mealtimes to enable us to take advantage of the extra time available to walk the dogs. If you join us be prepared to leave your phone in your pocket when we eat. Eyes up! We will sit out on the Eyrie balcony with a glass of wine and simply observe the slow creep of dusk, see the stars appear and the moon rise. We will chat and sometimes just quietly watch, let our minds wander. We will be screen-free and at the mercy of no other interruptions. Except for the mozzies. They’re back. If only sunscreen also deterred them. Business idea anyone?