This Exact Moment
By Rose Lindsey
Halfway through the year already, and what a year it has been! Speaking from a personal angle, these six months have seen my college graduation and my first time traveling internationally for study abroad, while the harrowing harms of our political landscape continue to escalate. It’s been a time of great success and celebration, and a time of unrest on a much larger scale. As a result, it might feel challenging to remain grounded to the current place and moment. This month’s prompt will focus on the observational, encouraging us to focus on whatever catches our attention and imagination in the exact moment we’re living in. This exercise is adapted from one offered by Sean McDowell and Samuel Green as I studied under them while traveling Ireland – I’d like to thank them for their eternal inspiration.
To start out, organize a place where you can mark down eight distinct categories for things you’ll observe throughout your day. This can happen in a standard notebook, or in a notes app on your phone. However, I would especially recommend making a pocket notebook out of an individual sheet of paper. This DIY guide will walk you through exactly how it’s done. You’ll be able to use one small page per prompt. The tactile experience of flipping through the mini pages works wonders for the mind!
Once you have eight areas to write in, go ahead and give each one a heading. Starting from first to last, label them as:
Unexpected textures
Sweet things
Overheard comments
Potent smells
Things with green in them
Graffiti OR Shirt slogans
Distracting noises
Hidden things
For the next 24 hours, keep this notepad accessible to you, and jot down something you notice whenever it satisfies one of those eight categories. Keep yourself brief but specific; notate exactly what about the thing catches your attention. Is it in contrast to something else? Is it remarkably bright? Do you find humor in it, or dismay? Try to capture each of these observations in, at most, five words.
Keep at it until you have between three and five observations for each category. By this time tomorrow, you’ll have a full set of ideas and noticings that you can refer back to at any point.
Although there is value in doing this exercise strictly to build your observational skills, you could also consider crafting a poem that utilizes one image from every category. What throughlines do you see between these elements? Why do they call you at this moment, in relation to one another? What feelings, memories, or ideas do these images elicit when they’re placed beside each other? Lean into the energy that exists “between the lines”, and compose a piece that leads you to more attunement with how you respond to the world directly around you.