Curiosity is key

By nature I love to explore. I can remember being at school and encouraging my friends to join me in discovering exactly what was underneath the stage of the school hall. Waiting until no one was around, we carefully opened the trapdoor, and climbed into the dirt beneath with torches in hand, home-made shields on our knees and masks covering our mouths in case the dust was too severe. Despite the fact that dirt and dust was all that was there, the excitement of the exploration remains in my memory. 

Wandering down alleys and streets, watching people while soaking in the sights, sounds and smells, fills me with joy.  At heart I am a flaneur, a person who walks the city in order to experience it.  

This morning, instead of going on a walk to discover and photograph more skyscrapers in Downtown Dubai, I made my way by metro to visit the souqs in Deira. I have visited this area many times and love to wander up and down the various alleyways known as sikkas. 

As I made my way around the Grand Deira Souq I noticed a sign I had not seen before: Museum of the poet Al Oqaili. Following similar signs I came upon a small museum which still had much construction going on on the outside. I discovered afterwards that the Al Oqaili Museum has only been opened this month.

 

I was welcomed in and made my way around the restored home of the poet.

 Earlier as I wandered I had tweeted, 

Smells of spices as I wander through the souks. #mindfulness #flaneur

— Linda Hollier (@lindahollier) December 11, 2012

Now on the walls I found a poem written by Al Oqaili about Dubai containing these words:

“Its scent captivated me since I was a little boy.

For it I left all valuable things.”

As I explored the home of the man who had been both a store owner and a poet, and whose work is highly valued in Arabic literature, I had a sense that I was meant to find this place. The poet’s table, his displayed writings, the quiet atmosphere of the courtyard, the teak doors and the restored gypsum ornaments, invited me to reflect again on the creativity that not only lays at the heart of silence, but flourishes when curiosity abounds. 

Al Oqaili had travelled about before settling in Dubai so he must have been curious. 

Recently, Anthony Lawlor tweeted the following:

Curiosity is the guiding impulse of flaneurs. cc @lindahollier

— AnthonyLawlor (@AnthonyLawlor) December 1, 2012

Further tweets by him read as follows:

Curiosity comes from the root to care. To care about life is to be curious.

Simply being present to what is as it is = a great adventure

Curioser and Curiouser is the natural response to noticing what is actually happening. 

The last tweet reminded me of my blog called “Linda in Wonderland” and made me realize again how much we need to encourage the natural curiosity of small children instead of stifling it.  Melissa Davis, the mother of George Davis, a fellow flaneur (both in the here and in the here2here of cyberspace), writes in an update to Mindfulness and Flanerie: 

Years ago I read a NYTimes op ed that shared the unscientific findings of a city dweller observing adults accompanying small children around a neighborhood in Manhattan. She reported that the majority of them pushed strollers which ensured timely arrivals wherever the adult was headed. She contrasted them with the handful of adults who walked – meandered – alongside their youngsters, stopping to examine every interesting flower or bit of flotsam along the way. She pointed out that there was nothing more important for a child that age to do than poke along – and through – every curiosity.

Right now we need to foster a generation that will ask questions, search for answers and create solutions.  Unfortunately most of our current school systems merely offer education - the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, and fail to encourage true learning. 

In a recent Huffington post interview entitled “Mindfulness in the Modern World”, Jon Kabat-Zinn states:

All the interesting stuff is found on the edge between knowing and not knowing.

NASA’s Curiosity rover has landed on Mars. Thirty-five years and 11 billion miles later, Voyager 1 has finally reached the edge of the solar system and will next enter a magnetic highway .

The realms of cyberspace appear to be limitless, and there too we will need to explore with care and curiosity. So fellow cyberflaneurs, not only do we need to listen deeply but our ascent needs to be noted for having at its heart, a deep sense of curiosity. 

Cyberflanerie: Deep Listening in Cyberspace.

This blog post has not been an easy one to write. For weeks now I have been thinking about and researching the concept of the cyberflaneur, a term which has been around since at least 1994. With logic and reasoning I have approached the topic, searching for a common thread or one particular aspect that could form the core of this post.

On Monday evening I awoke in the middle of the night, an unusual occurence for me. After lying awake for more than an hour with thoughts whizzing through my mind, I decided that if I was awake I should perhaps use the time well. As my blog was still uppermost in my mind, I made the decision to simply lie there and listen to all the information I had gathered. Instead of trying to manipulate it, I would listen to it instead. Perhaps it would offer me the clue I was looking for.

The second I made that decision, the title of this post was clear to me and all the pieces I had gathered began to fall into place. I listened and then after a while picked up my ipad to note what I had heard in case I forgot some of it by the morning.

Although the flaneur made his appearance in the 19th century, and was a term used to refer to the people who strolled through the city in order to fully observe and experience it, the flaneur truly thrived as a literary device.

Just as the artists of the time captured the essence of city life in sketches, the writers of the day began to use the flaneur to comment on the changes in modern day living which evoked both fear and curiosity. The flaneur was the narrator in literature, standing outside of and commenting upon, the events being described to the reader.

The life of those times was speeding up and the flaneur took the step back to observe and find meaning in what was being experienced. In current times, the speed of technological innovation is exponential, and there exists a deep need to make sense of it all.

Today as we move through the speedy spheres of cyberspace - the limitless mindspace we find ourselves in when using technology to communicate - I believe it is the perceptive attitude of the flaneur that we should seek to cultivate. Therefore I have chosen to focus on the practice of cyberflanerie rather than on the figure of the cyberflaneur, real or imaginary.

"Networked Awareness" from the gallery "Corridors of Cyberspace"

This practice will require a deep listening, whether it be to visual, aural or textual images.

Last week I tweeted a link to a group of monks singing Gregorian chant on national television. I copied George Davis, @virtualdavis, who incidentally is a fellow flaneur. Unbeknown to me George was in the process of preparing for a workshop on digital storytelling.

In our follow up twitter conversation I received the following:

@lindahollier True. A blog post is coming plus inclusion in a digital storytelling presentation on Friday. Your ears will be burning! :-)
— virtualDavis (@virtualDavis) October 24, 2012

The phrase “your ears will be burning” obviously made me realize that he was going to refer to my tweet in his blog post or workshops, but I have since realized that the expression takes on a new meaning when we apply it to cyberspace! In this sphere there is a great possibility that even when you are asleep someone else in some part of the world is looking at one of your posts, one of your pics, one of your tweets, one of your facebook updates, etc. These are often passed on as links to others - you are being mentioned and tracked in cyberspace probably more times than you can imagine!

If I was a cartoonist I would depict a cyberflaneur with huge burning ears, not only because s/he was being mentioned, but because s/he had developed the ability to listen intently from a place of silence!

This was the theme of George’s post: Storytelling: From Ira Glass to Gregorian Monks, but by writing it George had also demonstrated that he too had listened with the same quality he was promoting.

There is so much information coming at us in cyberspace that unless we nurture the intention of listening with “moment by moment, non-judgmental awareness” - the definition of mindfulness given by Jon Kabat-Zinn - we stand the risk of being overwhelmed and suffering from information overload. We will fail to capture the fleeting moment. It is only with an attitude of deep listening that we will be able to filter what really needs our attention.

"Ever-changing" from the gallery "Corridors of Cyberspace"

As we move through the fluidity of cyberspace, the moments of stopping and listening are maybe only a millisecond long, but they are the gaps in which we can mindfully step back and observe. I have written more about this in a previous post entitled “Mindfulness and the Flaneur”.

Practicing being in the here and the now also prevents a total immersion in the dreamscape which is wide open in the "corridors of cyberspace". What I mean by this terminology can be found here.

"The Meeting" from the gallery "Corridors of Cyberspace"

The crowd we encounter in cyberspace contains people from all over the world and with deep listening we will be better able to empathise with the other we encounter. The individual and the collective will benefit from these encounters.

"Deep Listening" from the gallery "Corridors of Cyberspace"

The above is my art piece which has come out of writing this post. Yellow is associated with clarity and awareness and also symbolizes wisdom.

I end with the following story. The morning after my sleepless night, I checked my twitter stream, only to find this tweet from another dear twitter friend, Terri Taylor, @t2van:

Develop a passion for listening....imagine what might happen.
— Terri Taylor (@t2van) October 30, 2012