Orangutangents

Unseeing Eyes

Prompted by a quick chat with @JoanneWeaver yesterday on my previous chunk of Brian, and the fact that I'm heading over the water to Canada to visit the crew at Wattpad again tomorrow, I got to thinking about long periods of staring out of the window. 

They say travel broadens the mind, and that's absolutely true. You get to experience different cultures, ways of thinking, food, drink, scenery, beliefs, and of course stories.

But you also get to sit and stare, if you choose to.

Staring out of the window, daydreaming, whatever you want to call it, gives you space to think. As I said in a comment somewhere "Daydreaming is an artform". And it very much is. I revel in the fact I sometimes lose hours of travel time just looking out of the window and wandering around with unseeing eyes in the odd confines of my head. Some of my best story ideas have come from just giving Brian free rein to play with an idea. Often the idea changes completely into something different, but that's kinda cool too. 

I was tremendously impressed with one of my eldest daughter's teachers recently when he said "Your daughter is a daydreamer, but I love watching her looking out of the window into space as you never know what she's going to say when she comes back."

I was never allowed to do that when I was at school, although I did so far too regularly according to my school reports. 

Travel gives me the opportunity to drift away from everything else, and although I don't miss my old morning commute at all, travel is different and should be done whenever you can, even if it's just a bus trip to somewhere different, a walk, or a cycle ride.

Daydreaming can of course happen anywhere, and can be combined with people watching too which can be a great source of characters. Sometimes it's simply good to disengage from the screen and go have a bimble. Allow the fresh air to circulate between your ears.