Change Your Perspective

It can be as simple as sitting on the floor...

Remember when you used to watch TV and do homework lying on your stomach, propped up on your elbows? Remember how solid the ground felt? How long your body felt? How big the room from that angle?

Did you ever lie on your bed, head pointed toward the foot, legs up against the wall? 

How many different ways did you used to look at the world? 

And when did it become only proper to sit in a chair, and see the whole of you life from one point of view?

Come check out the Hot Mess series on TikTok, and watch as I lose my mind - and find it again - writing, producing, and acting in a show!

#CreatingIsHealing🦋

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Hi, my friends. Um, I feel like I've forgotten how to do this podcast. I've been away for longer than I planned to. Um, I'm starting to feel better, very, very slowly afraid to jinx it. Um, and it's just taken me a while and I, the past two weeks I had this really wicked insomnia where I just was up all night and then had a really hard time getting up and functioning during the day and it threw me for a loop. So, um, making my way through that and starting to really come out of the, whew, the one long flare up. That was January and February for me this year. And, uh, it's now mid-March. So, you know,<laugh>, it's only one quarter of the year gone to being sick and on the couch. Um, I wanted to talk to you guys today about the power of changing your perspective. And I mean that actually physically, I obviously am a huge fan of travel. Um, I'm taking this gap year, if you haven't been listening, where I left my long-term apartment in Brooklyn last fall, September 1st, not knowing where I wanna live next. I've lived in Brooklyn for 15 years. I've loved Brooklyn with all my heart. It is still one of my favorite places. Just not quite the place I felt like I could build a community, um, anymore. And I really wanted a place that was creative and vibrant and artistic, but was a little bit slower paced. And where you could just go to a friend's place and hang on their couch on a Sunday and not have to make an event out of going to the theater or dinner. Um, and not have all your friends be so overscheduled between their day jobs and their creative careers that, you know, you could only see them every two months, which is one of the downfalls of living in such an exciting city. And so I bought a secondhand car, gave away all my furniture, packed some of things up into storage and hit the road. And, um, I've always been a fan of travel. I'm very lucky that I grew up with parents who are total vagabonds and they took us traveling a lot as kids. And I've always felt it expands your horizons. There's something incredible about going to a different country or different state, our different city, and seeing how people live. Like even the road signs in Quebec City, oh my goodness, the road signs. I could never figure out which way was a one way and which way I was about to turn the wrong way. Um, the way that, you know, when you go to Europe, people eat dinner much later, the Spaniards have a siesta in the afternoon. People tend to linger over dinners in Spain and Italy and France. There's a different, there's a different way people dress. There's a different way people built subways and, and, um, public transportation. There's a different way that people go to work or close on Sundays or close on Sundays and Mondays or close

Speaker 2: 2:58

Early compared to Elise, New York City compared to a lot of, you know, uh, states in the, in, um, cities in the us I, I've always just found to me so eye-opening to realize that not everyone lives the way that I know. Not everyone lives, um, in the standard that I'm used to. And what I love about that and what I've really been discovering in this gap year is this idea that they're all just made up rules and we inherit a lot of them, right? The way that road signs are, the way that cars are now built to fit into the way that the tracks traffic system has evolved. So it's um, it's a give and take, right? The things that you then use are also built for these systems that have been created. So they reinforce each other. Um, but someone invented how roads and how stop signs. And I mean, have you been to Europe? Do you know how many of those roundabouts there are? Like we barely have them here in the states,<laugh>, and I find them so puzzling and so stressful, but that's very normal to them. They find that a much better system than having a stop sign. Um, so there's just these really fascinating different ways that people solve for the problems of how to live together. And, and I love that. I absolutely love that. And what I realized though also is that you don't even have to go that far for a change in perspective. I was in an Airbnb in Greenville, South Carolina. I've now learned there's a Greenville in North Carolina and one in South Carolina. And you always have to specify cuz everyone will ask, at least in this area. So in Greenville, South Carolina, which I loved, it was so gorgeous and so laid back, their public libraries have incredible programming, um, really good arts area. And I was in this beautiful Airbnb. I was just so well decorated. It, it was, ugh, like just the colors. And this is another thing I've been discovering is how other people decorate their homes and what I can steal from them. The place I'm in now has an overabundance, if that's even possible, of plants. There are three plants in every room and a huge garden out back. And I just feel so restored hanging out indoors in this place. And so I've always killed pretty much accidentally every plant I've ever owned. And one of my new goals is to take some gardening lessons so that when I do eventually settle down, I can buy plants and keep them alive. So it's great to steal the things that you realize really work for you anyways in this beautiful, beautiful place with big windows, lots of sunlight and trees all around outside. The one missing thing was it didn't have a desk or a chair. It was really built for weekenders to come. And I was, I think their first kind of couple of week long time stay and there was a bed and then there were high stool kitchen stools, I guess, uh, in, in this, you know, kitchen area. Um, and so me being me, I like rejiggered everything. And I grabbed one of the high stools and put it in front of the window. Cause I, I love a desk that looks out over a view, especially fits into nature. And that worked somewhat, but it was kind of uncomfortable and it was really high up and I didn't have a ton of space. I was, you know, making it work. And I'm really trying not to work in bed as much, um, because it's terrible for my back and it's also just not energizing. And so I was running outta places to work. I'd kind of taken over the patio, which was beautiful, but then it got cold. Anyway, I realized that they had this beautiful carpet really lush and soft underneath and all around the bed. And I don't know why, this is shocking to me cuz I did this all the time as a kid, but I realized I really wanted to just lie on my stomach and work on the floor. And I remember like lying in front of the TV doing schoolwork on my stomach. I remember I was a ballet dancer for many, many years and we used to always sit with our legs, you know, um, doing a, um, a stretch. We were always stretching, we were always on the floor stretching while we did anything else. We were never conventionally sitting in any kind of chair. And, and I, so I lay down on my stomach and I realized that there is something visceral about changing the parts of your body that are in contact with the earth. And I had this, I, I don't even know what it was. It just, it was very safe. It was very grounding. It also brought me back to kind of that childhood idea of like sleepovers and study dates. Um, and I just, you know, it's also like your pelvis is on the floor and your stomach is on the floor. It's, it wakes up a whole different part of nerve endings. And I really loved it and it really made me just feel different. It altered my state. It's not that it was earth shattering or revolutionary, but I was thinking a lot about how, you know, we don't have to travel far. We don't always have that option to go far or travel. It might not be in the budget. We might have kids, we might have families. Um, we might have covid lockdowns. And, and yet it's so incredibly important, right? One of the hardest things about being a human is repetition. If you have the same thing over and over and over again, um, you actually can just get really locked into that and it can be really hard to see outside of it. And I think one of the absolute gifts that artists bring to our world is a different point of view on anything. That's what an artist does. You know, we're all living this human experience and everyone is living through it differently. And maybe an artist will take a paint brush and some colors and, and explain some piece of it that way. And maybe someone will, um, grapple with some words to try to explain some sensation or feelings they're having. Or, you know, you're gonna spend time in a script trying to figure out why that person had that point of view and how they would express that, right? That's, that's the joy. And that's also how we communicate across art. And so the very idea of getting out of the way that you sit every day and how much, you know, the brain is so connected to the body and creativity is so connected to the body. So if you're sitting in a different way, if you're curled up in a different way, you're writing in a different way, you're accessing things in a different way. And it made me remember how I used to lie on my back with my head at the foot of the bed so I could look at my headboard, right? And what a difference even that point of view was. Or I've been sitting on the floor more lately just sitting with my bed, my head, hmm, my back<laugh> sitting with my back against the bed. There's a really great window here that looks out, um, and doesn't have anywhere in front of it except really in front of the bed. And, and I love that. And I'm like curled up and my feet are propped against the wall. And you know, I'm, I've always been this kind of dancer who sits in weird, um, lotus positions and cross legs. I'm, I'm never sitting properly in a chair. I'm always like folded into a chair. I've always preferred that I tend to sit, um, cross-legged a lot, pretty much everywhere. And, and so the idea of putting up your knees and then putting your laptop on it, you know, it's, it's not meant to be comfortable, it's just meant to be about a different physical space. How do you see the world when you sit below the sky below the buildings around you? Not on a chair, not on a bed, not so comfortable. It's a little bit cold or it's a little bit, the texture of the wood is different, right? And it's not to say that those are necessarily where I go and write or they lead to whole new ideas, but just an invitation as an all things to experiment. And esp especially, or specifically if you're stuck with something, I would say take that notebook, take that piece of art. Or even just take yourself in some music and go find a corner you haven't sat in before. Go sit under a dining room table or outside on some, I don't even know what's outside anymore. Uh, depending on where you live and what there is, right? But I think this idea of being really creative about the places that we can occupy and even people watching from a different place. One of the best things about New York City is the people watching just so many people going and everyone's so busy they aren't even noticing you. So it's fantastic and it's such a fantastic mix of tourists. So people who come from very different cultures and locals who have a very different attitude to the tourists and to themselves. Um, I do it here too, but less so. But here are my favorite things to be in a car cuz you can drive everywhere. And that sense of motion is also really good. And, and seeing different, um, vistas pass you by I find incredibly. It just helps my brain settle, helps my brain wake up. And so this idea of, you know, can you sit in a different park bench at the park or can you stand under a maple tree and look out? Um, I used to lie in the park in Central Park under this stunning tree and just look up into the sky through its leaves. And it was one of my favorite daydreaming places on a Sunday afternoon. So this week's invitation is to change your perspective, whether that's big or small. Pay attention to how your body

Speaker 3: 11:53

Responds to new spaces. Pay attention to how your mind thinks differently. New spaces, how you relate to yourself, to the world, to other people. Are you more frustrated? Are you more open? Are you more curious? Are you more childlike and playful? All of these things can spark curiosity in a project or can help you define a character or can help you go down a new rabbit hole of something you're trying to express or wanna express. So I'm definitely gonna keep exploring. One of the really fun challenges is every time I end up in a new Airbnb, the, uh, construction is the wrong word, the layout of the room is different. The things that are available, whether there's a desk or not are always different. And I also currently between seasons, so like I've way more ledge than I wanna have. Cause I cannot figure out the temperature here. So I keep going between warm clothes and cold clothes, but figuring out what to pull out a car and what to keep in the car. Um, so the configuration is constantly changing. And I think that I have that built in this idea of, certainly I have it built in every three weeks. So far I've been traveling to a different bed, a different city, a different group of people. Um, so I'm getting that. But I also think even within that microcosm, I'm just finding ways to hang out with my own creativity and hang out with spaces as they are and get curious about what it is to live in the world in a different, in a different way. All right. That's it for me, my friends. I'm so happy to be back. I hope you are all well and creating to your heart's desire be well.