Imagine the passage of time in an empty room. For simplicity, let’s confine it to a day. What emotions crawl up your mind? How does the prospect appeal to you?
Let’s make the situation bare in the most visceral of senses.
Suppose you have no pleasantries to distract you; no possessions, no furniture, no decorations, no window. Expect nothing but the emptiness of a solid three-dimensional planar surface.
Does the setting feel an incarceration? A retreat? Does it produce fear, anxiety, or certain yearning?
Don’t needlessly allude to a solitary prison cell. Don’t think of repressed garments.
Let’s eliminate the contextual element and focus on the physicality of the moment in this hyperplane. Many of those immediate considerations indicate your core inclinations as well as fragilities.
Is famine your concern? Consider this. The human body withstands not merely one day of cleansing fast; no hindrance to cognitive ability or physique.
Beware strong attachment to frequent meals. Addiction, misleading brain chemistry cause irrational behavior. Trace back upon our roots.
Is it dehydration? Lack of water represents my immediate concern. I consume it in scary quantities. It provides the cleansing the body needs, and in a fasted condition, more than ever.
But one waterless day unlikely renders any fatal consequence. Bear further in mind, we expect little exertion in the said predicament.
Now coffee, as pleasant an effect as it produces, especially to a fasted organism, doesn’t strongly preoccupy me. Yet the prohibition may frighten some.
Is it the lack of sanitary facilities? I’d worry about that too. But look to the bright side. Lack of aliments shouldn’t much incite their use.
Does the isolation sound alarming? No ambient noise, no chatter, no social media feeds, no video clips, no messaging, no phone calls?
True indeed. In this space, you’ll have the refuge of neither the quick and easy information, nor the deeper and demanding. You’ll have no one to complain to.
Count on your creative potential and imagination as the sole means of entertainment. Meditate, ponder, create. Once liberated from distractions, once free of withdrawal symptoms, the mind is apt to construct majestic realms.
What about the physical support, you ask; the floor, the bedding, the staples of furniture we take for granted?
With great reliance upon these comforts comes vulnerability. Learn to ease your expectations. Grow content with any flooring, be it solid, cushioned, charming, or unsightly and dilapidated.
The floor provides all we need for rest, for work, for meditation, for movement. Be also appreciative of gravity for enabling us to so engage the ground.
Is such an isolated contraption manifest of any visual queue? A spacial transport exploring the frontiers? A dungeon in the sinister confines of the subterranean? A shipping vessel floating the seas? A construct of a virtual spartan program? A mythical chamber of the Cretan labyrinth? Or a product of an entirely abstract dimension?
Does the entrapment altogether differ from a pilgrimage in the vast Saharan planes? How about the pit of an empty water well? A cavern in the obstructed ice glaciers?
What does your imagination evoke? What ordeal do you feel equipped to face? What fragilities characterize you most? Ponder upon the calmness of this exercise.
Questions, comments? Connect.