Action 4: Stepping Out & Looking Wider

While doing Action 3, I had thought a lot about being connected with my cohort, which is spread around the world in different time zones. This got me thinking, ‘how could I explore the connections present in nature?’ Unfortunately, I was not allowed to go out of my house due to the lockdown in our locality. The only place I could go to, was my backyard.

While sitting there, I started to think about the plants around me. How are plants connected with nature? Looking closely, it was easy to say that plants are connected at 2 levels:

One below the Earth and the other above the Earth. Let us call the former as Level 0 and the latter as Level 1. While Level 0 stays below the surface of the Earth and houses the Roots, which supports the plant and provides it nutrition, Level 1  stays above the ground and is visible to all of us and has all the branches, leaves and flowers. Both these levels are connected in some way to their surroundings.

To get this into perspective, I thought of staying connected like being in a closed circuit. For the current to flow, the circuit needs to be connected/closed/complete.

Soon, I started to think of my connections, how I related to my Family, Friends, the Nature, and the Society.

My family is my first level of connection or Level 0. They are the roots I am connected to which support me. Moving a little further I am connected to my friends. Friends from school, college, and work. These are connections I have  just outside of my family so let us call them Level 1. Then if I expand further, I am connected to my surroundings, this would be the place I live in, my house. How I am part of it, everything that it has and how that affects me. Lastly, how all these connections make me a part of the society? How do they connect me to my city, my state, my country, my culture, and the world?

Looking at my connections, I wondered if it was possible to disconnect anything at all? Even a pencil kept on my table was at some point a piece of wood which was part of a tree. For it to become a pencil all that changed was its form.

I wanted to explore more connections in my surroundings and check if altering those connections changed anything? Since I wasn’t allowed to step out of my house, I decided to find connections in my room. Looking around my room I saw different things. All of these were kept in a certain place & in a certain manner. This got me thinking, ‘were these things any good to me if I were to change their place/orientation?

Where and how do I put the painting if it was not hung on the wall? Would it serve its  purpose? Where would the curtains go if they were not hung on the windows? Would the air conditioner be of any use to me if it were not hung on the wall? Certainly, I could change the place of somethings, but most of them had a certain connection to the place they were kept in. If this connection were to be altered there is a good chance that they would lose their purpose. I wanted to visualize the connection these things had with their places. To do so I started to tie things together with  a plastic rope.

Things which hung on the wall and things which settled on the ground. Doing this I could see my room split into 2 categories, reminding me of the plant example, I thought of before. Just as a plant required connections beneath & above the ground, in the same way, I required all these things to be in their designated places for them to be of any use to me.

Conclusion: For anything to be meaningful it is important that it is connected to where it belongs. Disrupting these connections can lead to unwanted results.