In a recent workshop on nature and mindfulness, I set the participants the task to go outside and find something to look at, and look at it for 20 minutes.
This is drawing from the work of Jennifer Roberts, who teaches art history at Harvard University, as described in Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks: time management for mortals.
“When you take a class with Roberts, your initial assignment is always the same. and it’s one that has been known to elicit yelps of horror from her students: choose a painting or sculpture in a local museum, then go and look at it for three hours straight. (…) The idea first arose, Roberts told me, because her students faced so many external pressures to move fast – from digital technology, but also from Harvard’s ultra-competitive atmosphere – that she began to feel it was insufficient for a teacher like her merely to hand out assignments and wait for the results. She felt she would be failing in her duties if she didn’t also attempt to influence the tempo at which her students worked, helping them slow down to the speed that art demands. ‘They needed someone to give them permission to spend this kind of time on anything,’ she said. ‘Somebody had to give them a different set of rules and constraints than the ones that were dominating their lives.’ “
Because I had a short day with the participants (rather than a full teaching term), I set them a 20-minute duration, which felt long already when I gave them the task: they would have 5 minutes to wander around and find something to look at, and bring a chair or blanket or anything they needed to be comfortable for that length of time, and then 20 uninterrupted minutes to look at the thing they had chosen.
I noticed where people headed off to, and when the 20 minutes were up I wandered around with a bell to call them back indoors. I did lose track of one though – I spotted their initial direction of travel, but didn’t locate them on my rounds. After a more extensive search (and 10 more minutes), we found them gazing at a tree, having lost track of time.
Feedback included how much longer people could have stayed, and how much they noticed going on in the insect wildlife and patterns of plants that we’d usually just pass by. There is a different process of wonder and observation that happens in nature, compared with the original exercise of gazing at human-made art.
In a future iteration of this exercise I will set it at 30 minutes of looking, and see how people get on.
