Thoughts on Cloud Watching
A rambling freewriting exercise, to help calm my mind, set free some thoughts, and help me feel more comfortable again with writing.
This summer, I took an online Personal Peace class from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. One of our assigned exercises required us to go outside and watch the clouds for 30 minutes. I recall my first thought being that 30 minutes is quite a long time, and that I have a lot of other things that I need to work on with that time: homework, essays, responding to my never-ending stack of emails, texting back all the people that I’ve forgotten to text back in the last several weeks, and the list goes on. Nonetheless, after spending most of my afternoon in the library working on these things, I decided to complete this assignment outside the library right after it closed, instead of going straight home.
I found an area where I could lay down, and set a timer for 30 minutes. I stared upwards at the clouds. This is what I saw:
My assignment was to observe the clouds, and at first I did not think I would have any troubles with this. When I was a child, I could easily sit on the floor and stare at anything for a long period of time — whether it was a grasshopper, praying mantis, or other insect navigating around the world, or leaves on a tree moving in the wind, making it look like the tree was waving “hello”, I had both an active imagination and a strong inclination towards just watching the world around me. It would be a dream, a perfect day for me, to be able to sit under a tree all day and watch the clouds move overhead, the sun shining between the leaves and the different shades of green changing depending upon where the light was hitting it. And then, to be able to stay out until the evening and watch the sunset, and then see the stars come out and the quiet stillness of the night — it would be like heaven for childhood me.
Unfortunately, adult me is not the same as child me. I found myself struggling to calm my mind, and struggling to truly focus on and observe the clouds. My mind was mainly preoccupied with the overwhelm of my To-Do list, but especially with the overwhelm of the digital social world. I knew that the emails, texts, and direct messages were still sitting in my inboxes as I was frivolously watching the clouds, and I was stressed about the understood social expectation of needing to respond to them eventually. If someone reaches out to you, generally, you are expected to respond.
It’s really odd when you think about it. We now carry around these devices with us, 24/7, which remind us that other people exist and can reach us at any time, and that we are expected to respond in a timely manner. The boundaries between us and our devices, and between us and other people’s lives, have started to dissolve. We can scroll on social media and be kept up to date on everything going on in someone’s life — or at least everything they wish to share about it. We have social relationships with other people without ever really seeing them in person or having real conversations.
Sometimes, it can feel fulfilling and lovely to catch up with people over direct message. Other times, it feels a bit empty. You can quickly run out of things to talk about other than the standard “How are you doing? How are things?”. I know that I am quite terrible when it comes to responding to such messages. I tend to leave them opened or unread as I struggle to figure out what to say back. Sometimes I leave them for too long, or never respond altogether. My genuine answer to the question would probably be, “I don’t know.” However, I get the impression that this is not quite the light, uncomplicated answer that is expected back.
Even when we are alone, we are never really alone. Our phones make sure of that, with their endless notifications about messages, or about other people’s recent posts; it really starts to become overwhelming. Even as a young child, I was quite aware that I had a strong need for solitude. However, ever since I got my first smartphone at 15 years old, I can’t think of enough times where I have truly felt this sense of solitude. It’s difficult to experience true solitude, without the nagging thoughts of my digital social obligations lingering in the background.
It finally dawned on me one day, after attending an Intro to Zazen workshop at the Cloud Water Zen Centre in Glasgow. During the talk part of the session, the Sensei was telling us that we have a lot of distractions in our everyday lives and a lot of thoughts, and that sometimes, we really just need to think less and be more present. He asked us, how many of us keep our phones in our room at night, letting it buzz with notifications while we are trying to sleep? He told us that we should try turning off our phones at night and see how that affects our mindfulness practice.
The thought of doing this immediately freaked me out. This defensiveness was an interesting thing to notice about myself. I had long thought that I needed to keep my phone nearby at night, just in case there’s a family emergency or important thing that happens, so that my loved ones can contact me if needed. Keeping my phone nearby at night definitely helped in certain situations where things really did happen, and I was able to get on the phone right away to help problem solve and sort it out. However, I realized that I started to feel a pang of fear or dread anytime I received an email, message, or text, because I was scared that something bad had happened.
One night, I tried doing as Sensei said. I turned off my phone before going to bed. Instantly, as soon as I saw the words “Samsung” appear and disappear as the phone screen faded to black, I felt something strange. Relief. A sense of internal stillness and calm that I hadn’t felt in a long time. It reminded me of the feeling I get on airplanes after putting my phone in airplane mode, knowing that I have a valid excuse for not having to respond to anyone for the however-many hours between takeoff and landing. However, this was even better, because it was an active choice. I could choose not to turn off the phone, and face no repercussions. And yet, I chose to. I was actively choosing to create a boundary between myself and my phone.
The thought about airplane mode is interesting, too. I’ve always loved the feeling of being on an airplane, even despite the occasional turbulence, motion sickness, or ear popping. Especially as an adult, I think it feels quite relaxing that we can be sitting idly in our seat, reading a book or staring out the window, and yet we are making progress. We are going somewhere. We are doing something necessary. The To-Do list item is to get to our destination, and through just sitting there in our seat, we are making progress in that.
Furthermore, there’s this feeling of disconnect between us and all the problems and stressors we face down below. They are 36,000 feet below us. We have no control over those things right now. In fact, we have no control over what’s happening right now; it’s up to the pilots to get us where we need to go safely.
As a girl who grew up on an island in the middle of the Pacific, had family on the East Coast of the US, and attended university across the pond in Scotland, I got used to long flights. Anything less than five hours feels a little short to me. One of my favorite things to do on these long, high flights is to stare out the window at the blanket of clouds beneath us. Even as an adult, something about being up in a plane over the clouds makes me feel like a kid again. I feel like I can watch those clouds forever.
So why was it so hard for me to watch the clouds now, on the ground? As I was pondering all of these thoughts, as well as many more, I realized that I had spent so much of my cloud-watching time not really noticing the clouds at all. Just thinking. Instead, I told myself to really focus on the clouds, just like I could when I was a child. I opened up my phone, swiped away the notifications, and put it on Do Not Disturb.
When I lay back down and stared up at the sky, I decided to focus on how the clouds were moving and being pushed by the wind. I noticed that they were not just moving in a certain direction, but being pulled apart like cotton candy. The words that came to my mind were “fluid” and “flow”, and I thought about how the clouds were composed of condensed water droplets.
Younger me could sometimes pick out different shapes in the clouds, and would often imagine what it would be like for there to be a hidden world on top of them. Older me was thinking more along the lines of how neat it would be to simulate clouds using fluid dynamics models, and was wondering if that’s what’s done in flight simulators and aerospace engineering simulations. Probably. I haven’t used that kind of software before.
I was starting to think that maybe this isn’t what our professor meant when we were assigned to stare at the clouds. At least my thoughts were now about clouds, but I was still not necessarily being present. I was pondering this when somebody came up to me and tried to catch my attention.
I sat up quite quickly, and they apologized for startling me. They asked if I could listen to a song they made and if they could take a video of my reaction for TikTok. I politely declined and told them that I’m awkward on camera; despite a previous attempt at student vlogging, I never quite overcame the camera shyness. We talked for a few minutes about social media trends. Then, they asked me what I was doing and I explained that I was staring at the clouds for a class assignment. I felt sort of silly, because I realized how strange I must have looked.
“What did you notice about the clouds?”, they asked.
Well… I told them that I noticed how the clouds were being pushed by the wind and were pulling apart from each other, as well as recombining with other pieces of cloud. I said that it reminded me of cotton candy, how you could pull it apart and then re-stick it as well.
My 30 minute timer started sounding, and I turned it off.
We ended up in a conversation for a while, maybe 20 minutes, about clouds and mindfulness, as well as college and other things. They asked for my Instagram so that they could send me the link to their song, we started following each other. Eventually, they had to get home and I had to resume watching the clouds. They wished me good luck.
It was more quiet after this, and there were less people passing by. I set another timer, this time for less than 30 minutes (maybe 15 or 20), just to make sure that the time would add up to a full 30 minutes of the experience. The unexpected interruption made it difficult to calm my mind at first, but the environment around me was at least more quiet and I could notice the wind rustling the tree leaves.
I continued to watch the clouds move fluidly, breaking apart and rearranging themselves. I imagined that they were communicating to do this, that it was some kind of synchronized dance. That there was a story behind it, and that the clouds were consciously choosing to behave this way. Or that the wind was separating them from each other and they were quite upset about it at first, but then it was alright because they rejoined with other clouds afterwards. That it was just the part where the little wispy bits of cloud were in the middle of the big blocks of clouds, slowly floating over to join the other block, that they felt kind of anxious or nervous about the entire situation. I don’t know why I was thinking this way, maybe to make the experience less dull, but it actually started to feel quite relaxing. It reminded me of the stories behind the clouds that I’d think of as a kid.
Eventually, the timer went off.
By this time, the clouds were starting to turn more pink, and I knew that sunset would be happening soon. The outdoor lights near the library lit up, and the contrast was quite pretty against the blue sky and pink-ish clouds.
Before leaving, I decided to take my phone out for a photo of it, although I’m not sure the photo quite does it justice.
After this, I walked home and enjoyed the sunset. I liked how the orange light bounced off the buildings, and how the clouds in the sky captured the pinks and oranges. I wasn’t really sure if I did the exercise the correctly, however, I realized that maybe part of trying to become more mindful is not worrying about whether I’m doing it right or not.
The odd part is that, a couple weeks later, I attended a Vipassana session at a Korean temple and realized that I was able to meditate again, after not having done so in a while. However, something like having my eyes open and staring at the clouds was quite difficult for me. I noticed that I have more trouble meditating with my eyes open, because the visual stimulus can overwhelm me.
Part of reconnecting with myself has been remembering my need for solitude as well as for darkness; allowing myself some time to sit in the dark or close my eyes without having all this visual stimulus. I am not quite sure why I am this way, but at least it has become a tool that can help me counter these feelings of overwhelm. Maybe if I start tuning into these needs more, creating more space and time for them, my mind can begin to calm down, and the cloud watching will become easier. It’s odd how something that was once so easy is now so difficult. Most likely, I also just need to practice.
To be fair, it’s not really just about watching clouds though, is it? In its simplicity, it appears to be a metaphor for much more.
— — —
I am pretty sure this freewriting exercise turned into a long, rambling mess, and changed tone somewhere in the middle when I became distracted for a while by looking up things about flight simulators.
Along the way, there was a really cool r/aviation Reddit post of someone’s friend’s really cool fix based 747–400 simulator setup, and that led into a whole spiral of trying to find places where you could try out a flight simulator setup, and then just ended up looking up stuff about planes in general. Ended up on the Wikipedia page for DC-10s. Found an article about setting up a home flight simulator. Realized that I got very distracted.
However, it was nice to be able to write something again, and to not feel so much writer’s block. I still struggle a lot for words, and then ramble a lot when I find the words, but I am hoping that, through practice, this will all become a lot easier. :)
