Air Through the Car Window

A moment of stillness, waiting in the car outside the pet store. The window was open. That's the whole scene.

This comes from a journal entry I wrote in February 2022, like the G.I. Joe one came from 2016. It's short. I've filled it in a little here, but the bones are what I wrote down that day.

The pause

This pause brought a stark realization: I spend an excessive amount of time tethered to the computer screen. The sheer volume of hours indoors became apparent.

It's funny what it takes. Nothing happened in that car. I was just sitting there, waiting, with a few minutes that didn't belong to anything, and that was enough room for the thought to show up.

Tethered is the right word, too. A tether isn't a cage. You can move around, get up, go get a coffee. You just can't go very far, and you always get pulled back to the same spot.

I think that's part of the point. When you're always in front of a screen, there isn't a gap for that kind of thought to get through. The hours just stack up, one on top of the other, and they all look the same from the inside. You only see the pile when you step away from it.

The air

Feeling the air through the open window, a simple, pleasant sensation, underscored the imbalance.

That's the detail that stuck. Not a view, not a sunset, not anything worth taking a picture of. Just air moving across my arm through a car window in a parking lot. And it was pleasant, simply and plainly.

If something that small can feel that good, what does that say about how little of it I'd been getting? That was the question sitting underneath the whole moment. I didn't need a big outdoor adventure to prove anything. The evidence was the window.

Hours indoors are easy to miss because they don't look like anything. There's no moment where you decide to spend the whole day inside. It adds up while you're busy, and the only way to see the total is from somewhere else. That day, somewhere else was a parked car.

There's a clear value in direct, physical experience, and I'd been neglecting it.

A screen gives you a lot. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But everything it gives you comes through the same rectangle, at the same distance, in the same chair. Air through a window doesn't come through anything. It's just there, and you're just in it.

The adjustment

A conscious adjustment was needed.

I didn't write out a plan. There's no schedule in the entry, no app, no list of goals. It was just two short lines. No fanfare, no promises about who I'd be in a month.

"Implementation starts tomorrow" is a funny way to talk to yourself. It reads like a memo. But there's something about it that fits. It isn't a resolution or a vow. It's a decision with a start date, and the start date is close enough that you can't really hide behind it.

More time outdoors. Implementation starts tomorrow.