I spend hours staring at things

And the thing is not my phone

Maybe it was the “local” mushrooms I had for dinner at the restaurant that night. Or maybe it was the disorientation that comes after four hours driving through a steady rain. Maybe it was just that the clouds in the mountains of West Virginia are different than southern Indiana clouds.

Maybe it’s none of the above. I don’t know how to explain the fact that I spend over an hour on a Friday night, lying in a hotel bed in Charleston, watching the clouds above the edge of the valley on the other side of the Kanawha River.

From my particular spot on the bed, I could see the trees on the far side of the river. A big, old house with a front porch and lots of dormer windows built on the side of the hill. If I sat up, the train tracks and the road came into view, but I didn’t need trains or cars to entertain myself. All I needed was the clouds.

It had been a rainy day, I could hear the sound of tires on wet pavement from the road below. I had a perfectly good book I could have read. The TV could have been turned on. Always, always, always there was the phone I could have looked at. But I didn’t want any of that. I wanted to lie on the bed and watch the clouds.

The rain by that point had stopped. As I watched, the dark gray clouds moved past quickly, pushed by some front that would hopefully bring warmer weather. The clouds were thicker and thinner in moments, but never broke up altogether. The sky beyond never broke through, though there was a suspense in watching to see if that might happen. There was a suspense in waiting for a peek of that blue, or eventually, of the stars or the moon.

At one point, the clouds turned white-edged, which was an interesting and hopeful development. Was that the sunlight at last breaking through? Or the moon edging the clouds? Or was it just a different type of cloud—white instead of gray? There were so many questions, if not a lot of answers. There was just the action unfolding out the window.

My very sad, from memory sketch of my view from the hotel window

I didn’t see a rainbow. I didn’t see some rare cloud formations. There weren’t even any birds. There was absolutely nothing unusual about these clouds or this sky, and yet, I was entranced.

One the wooded side of the hill, a light appeared in the trees. It shimmered as if maybe it was a fire or the tree branches were moving back and forth across it. The light was all I could make out. Was it another house concealed deep in the woods? A campfire with people gathered around? Just a boring light pole? I have no idea, though I enjoyed making up stories to explain that glow.

Two windows in the big house were lit. Eventually a third lit up. Was it someone coming home? The preparations for a Friday gathering? Or just a timer?

“Why don’t I spend more time looking at clouds?” I asked my husband when we turned off the lights to go to sleep.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Of course, there’s something about travel itself that makes cloud-watching easier. That feeling of being jarred out of our normal routines. If I laid on my bed for over an hour at home looking at clouds, I’d feel lazy. Instead, I sit on our couch for hours looking at my phone instead.

I also spend a lot of time trying to reconstruct the world that existed before the internet and social media and smartphones. I lived in that world. What did I do with all that time? I don’t think I looked at TV screens instead of my phone. There just wasn’t enough to watch back then, in the world where you had to wait for a certain time for a show to be on.

I also don’t think the extra time was spent reading. I mean, I probably did read more and certainly with fuller attention. But even I couldn’t read that much.

So what did I do? What did we do? It’s a mystery and not an idle one. When I think about spending less time on my phone, the questions I’m always confronted with is, well, what do I do instead? What will fill that space in my life? Clouds? Maybe.

Maybe it was the mushrooms or more likely, the disjointedness of travel, but I was not for one single moment bored by the clouds. If it had not gotten dark, I could have gone on watching. It cost nothing to stare at those clouds. It contributed nothing to the bottom line of a billionaire. It did not fill me with doom or envy or even dopamine. It fille me with awe. It was an activity as old as humans. Watching clouds.

Maybe it’s all much more simple. Maybe I’ve just finally gotten tired of staring at my phone. Maybe I’ve finally realized that there’s no real joy there. Just little jolts of dopamine that fade too quickly.

Meanwhile, the clouds have been waiting, patiently, all along.

Welcome new subscribers! I hope reading my essays are at least and perhaps more entertaining than watching clouds.

I know I promised Georgia O’Keeffe posts and they are coming, but I’m at the beach and left the biography at home. So, soon. If you want to read the Van Gogh series, check it out here.