Something I've learned in the last few months of 2020, is that there's a tremendous amount of sense memory involved with laying down on the floor. It took about two weeks of never leaving my house for my back to tense up and my hips to start grumbling before I did anything about it. I tried a little yoga, bought some dumb expensive stretching thing off the internet, and I became more mindful of how I sat and moved around. All of it seemed to kind of work, and suddenly I found myself crawling around on the carpet more often than I had in years.
At the same time, I coincidentally began taking photos from the carpet to give myself different angles. Being down there a while meant I eventually saw the sky above me again. I became transfixed by laying prone and examining the architectural diagonals and colorful hues of summer, even if I've been unable to represent them in photography. I have no device in my camera bag or skill in my repertoire that captures the stunning blue and white contrast of slatted blinds and a cloudy sky. I was similarly delighted to discover - from the carpet - that the view of the sunset out my bedroom window was full of gorgeously dark purples and hazy, atomized pinks. The carpet showed me that I didn't need to leave my home to capture the day-into-night sky in all its time-lapse glory.
Every time I got up and down from the carpet, I noticed more about the world as it's shaken out during quarantine. It would have been totally normal, in December, to find a discarded train ticket from my work bag in the shadowy region under my mattress. In June, I found a paper mask in a clump of dust at the southwest corner of my bed frame - a testament to the paranoia and the stasis of this awkward time.
One day I caught a glint of the sunlight from the carpet as it bounced off the shiny base of my new desk chair - another early upgrade that was prompted by my mouthy lower back. It was here where I realized that my home and I have both changed quite a lot during quarantine, and that some of the new stuff around me has a much shinier complexion than I do.
But none of these realizations compare to the one I experienced when I just laid down and relaxed on the floor of my room. A few minutes of laying flat was all it took for every muscle, joint, and bone to cry out from neglect. The discomfort felt like a chance to listen to my body and examine the personal fallout from 2020. I soon discovered that my stretching skeleton's inner sounds are indistinguishable from the noise of an old wooden floorboard as we both creak from age.
Now I spend as much time as I can on the floor. That stretching exercise has turned into quite the meditational discipline. I lay super-flat, breathe in deeply through the discomfort, and discover a center from which to really consider the truths of my life, including the curiosity of my younger self. Ironically, he is blissfully unaware that his generation will one day forget - in the grand tradition of all grown-ups - that it's all happening on the floor.
The floor is where we first achieve sentience. It’s where we discover some fundamental truths of our existence - gravity, tangibility, and our perception of linear, dimensional space. We learn on the floor, we create on the floor, and our minds are most fertile and curious at an age when we spend all of our time on the floor. Our imagination is first activated on the floor, where we build fantastical worlds around us that never live up to the hype. Crafting or painting on a couch or at a table may be comfortable, but doing so from the floor presents the mind with new challenges that inspire creative decisions. We problem-solve differently when we spend time on the floor, underneath the regrettable world built by adulthood. And as adults, I believe we would all benefit from some time spent reconnecting with those fundamental truths we learned from the floor so long ago.
Get down on the floor as often as you can. Spend some intentional time down there for more than just yoga or regular calisthenics. I am confident you will hear and see things that awaken long-dormant memories and happy senses of that time when you learned and played, and talked, and slept, and wrote that thing, and you had a life before desks and power strips and rolling chairs with shiny bases.
Dear reader, you may be asking, "has Ari spent so much time alone that he's now posing third-person questions about a journey of carpet-laden self-discovery?" And to that, I would have to say yes. But trust me when I tell you, it's all happening on the floor. The last thing to find down there is you.