And then there are those day, days without written progress of thought. My room has the ability change meaning with my own occupation in it. On days when I come home late, tired and exhausted from the hectic schedule of the day, it’s nothing more than a dark room paid little attention to till the morning sun rises and shines bright in my eyes, waking me up to spend just a few minutes of awake time before I head out again.
I take the only staircase in my building downwards and into the open clearing in front of my apartment. There, is no natural landscape. There is no natural. There is no landscape. Since the past few weeks, I had been intending to work on a thesis proposal without actually being able to actively do something about it. There was a ‘plan’ I had in mind. The plan constituted of a transformation of my room, bringing in material for model making and converting all the walls into space where I could scribble with markers and pens. I was trying to set up the room to create an environment ‘healthy’ enough for thought to flourish. It didn’t happen that way.
What did happen was a book. More specifically it was a book on a bus on my way to work and back. It’s not exactly what was in the book and I say that because sometimes I didn’t have to read the book at all. Sometimes all it took was to take it out of my bag, open the bookmarked page and the rest came with staring out of the window. Ideas would flash before me. Recollection of thoughts would take me to places of their origin while I would miss the bus stops I was physically passing by. ‘Defence Mor’ , ‘R.A. Bazaar’ and ‘Liberty Gol Chakkar’ it seemed were not on my route. I was somewhere else. To be specific, I was in my third year design studio, discussing ideas with my teachers. Then I passed by the corner of me lying on my lounge sofa inside my house in Karachi watching a documentary on TV. Afterwards there seemed to have been a prolonged stopover at the road that led through the valley of Neelum in Kashmir.
That last destination could actually be the equivalent of having lost my orientation and needed the timely intervention of a passenger getting up from the seat beside me to bring me back to physical space and make me realize the bus is actually about to reach the Gulberg ’Main Market’ stop. I wonder then, have I changed assigned meaning of the space around me? Or has the space adapted to me?
Later in the day I reach home early to pen down my thoughts. As I stare into the darkness for a while, I set off to typing down the disjointed ideas running in my head. Soon the ideas make some relevant sense and are the beginnings of conceiving an initial abstract. Have I changed the character of my room without any physical intervention?
The argument lies as much in physical form as it does in our mental ability to both perceive and project. Here when I talk about perceiving, I mean not the input of information that our sensory receptors receive, but how they react to it. An over sensitive ear will hear things more sharply and will think of sound as more defined compared to someone with weak hearing. Over time we are all then molded into defining what is normal for us. Such conditioning would overlap itself constantly, so all new information is received in relative terms. And then there is the projection. The relative reality we are all bound to experience.