Clouded.
1 am, time for some TikTok to escape reality for a bit. My eyes prepare to glaze over, and my pointer finger prepares to scroll. The light of the app opening hits my face, and I know I’m going to find some decent content to laugh about if I scroll long enough. My head is almost completely fogged as I take information on how to make “easy college dinner recipes”, how Sprite is changing the green bottle to clear, gentle parenting and trauma healing techniques, and that corn kid ordering only corn from Chipotle. I have Alan Walker’s “End of Time” song playing in my head nonstop, only to pause momentarily for the song, “It’s Corn!” While I want to stop to do something else, I don’t, and such results in an endless mayhem of scrolling, acknowledging, and moving on. My mind is clouded, my thoughts are clouded, but at least I know how to make the perfect black buttercream without using cocoa powder.
Lucid.
12 pm, struggling to walk in the humidity and heat of a summer afternoon. I settle for sitting under a large tree near the Music Building in the courtyard area, as Mason Pond didn’t have any shade. I forget to bring my blanket to sit on, so my tiny Mason sweatshirt will do for now. I begin to open my sushi I bought minutes beforehand, and I already spot ants, flies, and creepy crawlies habituating upon my leg. Wonderful. I munch on my cream cheese roll, and look around, not gathering much from my surroundings besides observing students rushing to class. I hear crickets flooding the sound environment with the occasional blaring of a construction truck from time to time. I later realize the cricket sounds come in waves, similar to a bee or fly zooming past an ear back and forth. I lay down ready to experience the wonders of nature, only to be drowned out by my own thoughts. In a place so quiet, who knew my brain could be quite this loud? Minutes pass that feels like hours, until my thoughts begin to grow quiet. For just a second, if not a few minutes at best, I feel serene and sane. Like everything surrounding me is at peace and I finally become lucid to the importance of stepping away from reality. Everything is as it should be. Until my alarm snaps me back, informing me my time of peace is over.
Thoughts.
The different impacts of media and nature as forms of escape is incredible. One filled with information designed to overstimulate the audience, and one with minimal information, as means to calm the mind. Both are used for distraction in one way or another, and one is more rewarding than the other. Immersion into nature is a great way to calm the mind and get information that isn’t designed for overstimulation. Although it is difficult to get to that point, where you can’t just turn off your brain unlike media, it is overall much more rewarding and grounding. It is temporary sanity in the sea of insanity.