This Place That Place by Nandita Dinesh

Author:Nandita Dinesh [Dinesh, Nandita]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melville House
Published: 2022-06-14T00:00:00+00:00

HOW IT EVOLVED, AND DEVELOPED, AND GREW

A GUIDE TO CURFEW TIMEPASS

THE GLAZE

This is the best of all the strategies that I have come up with to make time pass more quickly during curfew. A strategy that can be used when some of the other strategies do not last for as much time. This is a strategy that I started developing sometime during my first hundred curfews. A strategy that involves intensely focusing on nothing. Staring at a point, with one’s eyes open or closed, and focusing on the point. Watching that point as the glitter that composes it shape-shifts around it and takes on new patterns and behaviours.

Glazing is an active process of disconnecting from the reality of curfew, or any reality. Of suspending thought by actively disengaging from whatever might be happening (or not) in the world around the glazed individual.

To glaze doesn’t mean to avoid thought altogether. It simply means purposeless focus. Where emerging thoughts ebb and flow and appear and disappear. As do the patterns of light behind open or closed lids. When successfully executed, glazing could make an hour seem like minutes. A useful skill to hone during a curfew.

Over the years, for when just sitting and staring didn’t work, I have also designed a few different strategies to help foster the glaze. Counting grains of rice, for example, or folding and refolding clothes. Doing a task over and over again created a repetitive motion that did not require too extensive an intellectual engagement. That’s the trick with glazing, you see. It cannot be achieved through an activity that demands too much of the body or the brain or the emotions. The state of glaze can only be achieved when the activity is banal enough to not warrant extensive brainwork but stimulating enough to keep the glazer from falling asleep. Though falling asleep, as mentioned earlier, can also be an incredibly useful strategy during curfew.

In addition to counting rice and folding and refolding clothes, here are some activities that I have found to be particularly helpful to undertake while attempting to glaze: tweezing the hairs from the underside of my chin, sweeping, washing dishes, mopping, removing cobwebs, stretching, sitting still with one’s eyes closed, doing physical exercise of some kind, finding the sweet spot between something that is too easy and something that’s too difficult, staring out the window. This is a list that I am continuing to build, while taking care to ensure that I do not overlap glazing attempts with any of the other strategies that I have put in place to pass specific hours of curfew. If the glazing activities overlap with other activities, the whole hour-by-hour system I have carefully crafted could fall apart.

The trick to successful glazing—to successful timepass during curfew—ultimately, is discipline. Create a system. Maintain the system. And don’t break the rules of the system that you have created for yourself.

Could this disciplined, self-created, and self-imposed rule following be interpreted as a problematic recreation of the larger scale

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