Ceiling Walk

I have a homework assignment for you today.

Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing: lie down for a minute. (If you’re unable to do that lean back in a comfortable position instead.)

What do you see?

Do you spy a cottage cheese ceiling? Are there crown mouldings in the corners of the room that you’ve never noticed before? What sort of lighting is up  there? Are you looking up at trees or clouds?

Most importantly: what obstacles would be in your path if the world turned upside down and the ceiling became the floor?

My Apartment

would have a rough cottage cheese floor. The windows would begin about six inches off the floor and there would be ungainly steps to every other room in the house. The walk to the front door would be especially treacherous with a light, fire alarm, smoke detector and carbon monoxide detector all crowded around the step to the hallway. The door handle would be a little difficult for me to reach without some sort of step stool.

It wouldn’t be as difficult as hanging onto the nubs of buildings or the spindly fingers of trees outdoors, but I can imagine tripping a time or two before I grew used to the change. Luckily, we wouldn’t have any staircases to navigate at home in the event of a topsy-turvy world. Learning to slide down what was once their smooth, gradually-sloping ceilings would be rather tricky.

Why Do This?

“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”——The White Queen, from Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.

I like these types of exercises because they stretch the mind, encouraging one to think not only outside of the box but of a world in which the box may not always sit nicely on the floor, have the same number of sharp corners or actually be a box at all from one day to the next.

More importantly, it’s entertaining. One of the worst things about becoming an adult is how serious life becomes all of the sudden. Play is pushed to the dankest, most remote corners of our lives if it is even allowed to continue at all. Yes, sometimes the bills need to be paid, the house cleaned, the laundry folded, the toilet fixed, the groceries purchased and put away.

At other times, though, one needs to play.

What hurdles are on your ceiling?

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3 Responses to Ceiling Walk

  1. Pingback: Tweets that mention Ceiling Walk | On The Other Hand -- Topsy.com

  2. teresa

    The Lewis Carroll quote has been a favorite of mine for a long time. I love it! The fun part of this post was reading it! You are such an imaginative person. It’s true that the daily grind crowds out the fun of life sometimes. This is a good exercise to stretch the imagination! I have a somewhat intricate crown molding around my ceiling, and the windows are quite high. I’ve always wanted a room of windows that went from the floor to the ceiling, so by turning this room upside down I could almost have that! The windows would only be about a foot off of the floor and I’ve have a wall of windows! I am not a curtain fan…I prefer no window dressings. I realize this is not the ‘norm’, but it’s what makes me happy. I even had someone once call and tell me that they dreamed that I got curtains for my windows…then she asked me why? I don’t have them??…as if it was weird or something?!
    I realize I’m not really following through with your directives on this, but it has tickeled my imagination in other ways…so in a way it has achieved it’s purpose…it’s fun to play! We all take life so seriously.
    One of my biggest pet peeves is people who tell me I have ‘too much time on my hands’. This would be one of those times that a remark like that might pop up…LOL…I hope I ALWAYS have too much time on my hands!!!

    • Thank you. 🙂

      We didn’t have any kind of curtains or drapes at our last apartment. We were in the only tall building in the area and our apartment was high enough that nobody could see in.

      I assume that you don’t have any neighbours living next door? If you don’t, I probably wouldn’t bother with curtains or drapes either, especially somewhere like a living room or kitchen where one will (probably? 😛 😉 ) not be undressing or anything like that.

      A bedroom would feel a little weirder to me. But if there aren’t any neighbours around, who is going to see?!?

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