By: Anonymous
Virginia has been my home for about 15 years, and in that time, I have familiarized myself with the outside, with the smells of the misty mornings, the sunny afternoons, and rainy evenings. I don’t go outside as often as I did when I was younger, when I had the energy to stay outdoors. I figured this assignment wasn’t going to add or change my perspective much. Obviously, I was wrong.
I can’t say much about my time spent in the “mediated environment,” since most of my free time is spent there anyway. In recent years, I’ve found myself to be a bit of an escapist. I use this comfortable place, the mediated place, to ignore stress, to dive into a headspace that allows me to step completely away from my friends, from drama, responsibility, homework, or chores. If you’ve ever considered yourself a “binge-watcher” you might have found yourself in a similar situation, that finding out which Salvatore brother Elana chooses is way more fun than writing a paper about net neutrality. After all, college is a scary place that flips between having everything due and nothing to do, constantly. So, the first hour in mediation was spent on the switch as I tried to unlock all of the vehicles and customizations on Mario Kart 8 which stretched out for longer than it was originally planned to. An extra hour was spent on Youtube, where I learned about the fall of Vine star, Gabbie Hannah, about how Kameron Michaels won the lip sync battle and puled the lipstick with Eureka’s name, and sent her home on Rue Paul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 6. I saw how Gossip Girl definitely wasn’t feminist, and how Bo Burnham’s “inside” is a great example of white liberal performance art.
I started my hour spent outside with “wow its hot, I’m sweaty, I’m bored, I’m hungry.” No distractions, no music, no Youtube, no Nintendo, just me on a bench with nothing to do. So practically speaking, all there was to do was look. I was in the middle section by Hampton roads with the volleyball court. At first, I skimmed, then looked, then stared, and then I thought, contemplated, and wondered. These trees don’t look to be that old. There are a few trees by Krug hall that are fat and wide, those must be old, but the ones by me, the ones by this path, they’re tall but thin. So, if I were one of the older trees, what would I have seen before the existence of these thinner ones. What was here before campus was built? And by that way of thinking, who was here hundreds of years ago, has someone stepped exactly where I have in recorded history? What about before then? I remember months ago I saw this tiktok about how you could text this number with your area code and it will text back the name of the tribe that used to inhabit the space before they were forcibly removed, where you now live. From Williamsburg, there were the Kiskiack. I remember thinking how sad and dastardly it was that the golf course nearby is named after that tribe, the symbol on the sign even has what I’m assuming is a native man in a headdress and a spear, basking in sunlight. So, at this point, roughly 7 minutes have passed, and I’ve still got 53 more to go. I took a walk to the staircase that connects the Johnson center to the Concert hall. Here, trees hang over top of you and forms a natural tunnel. Around the corner, there’s a singular tree in a patch of wild looking purple flowers angled down like funnel towards a drain. I stood by the drain and looked up. The scene seemed almost magical, like Disney would have made a short film about a sleeping woman that turned into a plant. I spent the rest of the time watching students on their way to class, watching groups of friends, couples, how they were dressed, how much noise they made, if they were on their phone. People watching is an activity I engage with often at GMU.
Overall, the quantifiable amount of thinking I did in both environments was the same. Admittedly, however, one of the environments put words in my head to stitch together thoughts created by another person. I played a game someone else designed and watched videos someone else filmed. The other environment gave me the space to speculate, observe, or do absolutely nothing at all. Any and everything I thought about was mine, it came from me, and it went only to me. This experiment brought me to a few conclusions. One, that I waste entirely too much time on my phone if days seem to go by as fast as I thought they did. Two, that I could learn a lot about woman’s fashion just by looking around me because the styles found at Mason are strikingly unique. And three, that I need to create more mental spaces for myself that allow me to deal with my daily tasks and not avoid them. The natural environment opened me and gave me the calm I needed to self-reflect. There’s a saying on the internet if you’re doing something strange or pointless, you need to “touch grass,” which means to get fresh air and back in touch with how the world works. If youre told to touch grass its because youve been online way to long and need to familiarize yourself with something more still and natural. Getting back in touch with nature is an incredibly useful tool to find clarity and peace, so effective and useful it seems, it’s become a meme. This is a lesson im going to take with me for the remainder of my time as a student, then an employed person, then a caretaker. As ridiculous as it sounds, I went outside, I touched grass, and it genuinely helped.