At night, turn off all your lights

Immediately after typing that I considered capitalising it as a title. Then I thought naaaah.

There’s a thing I do and you should do it. I told Sam about it, one of the million things I’ve told Sam about and now I’m telling you about it because you’re special and I love you.

What you should probably do is kick everyone out of your house or do it when there’s no-one else around. I do a lot of things when no-one else is around. Thinking, consume art, writing, playing piano etcetera.

At night, turn off all the lights in your house everywhere. Procedurally ensure that every light is turned off and then place yourself in the last room with a light on (better if it’s a lamp) then turn it off.

Navigate your space.

(I’m going to rush on with a ton of assumptions now so just go with it).
You know this space. You’re so super familiar with it. You know how many steps it is from wherever you’re standing now to wherever you want to go except you can’t walk at the same speed as you normally would.
Oh – you can wait for your eyes to adjust to ambient light if you like but it’s more fun if you immediately start moving.
So now that you’re walking slower, your confidence diminishes just a little bit. You also immediately notice how much force you’re putting through your legs or would normally and really wind it back. You lift your thighs, but relax the muscles below the knee as you slowly swing out. If your toe or shin hits anything, it’ll be with dramatically less force.
You instinctively reach out with one hand to also act as a sensor.
With each step, you anticipate coming into contact with a door jamb, a coffee table or a light switch but when you don’t, you recalculate your estimated location within the room. The instant you touch something, your location on the virtual map in your thought-space snaps into accuracy and you know where you are. If you turn a corner into a hall that’s lit by ambient light from outside – perhaps a skylight or streetlight, you move with increased confidence and force.

You’re familiar with this space, it’s your home, you’ve walked around it a million times and yet you’re now also unfamiliar with it. It begins to grow and shrink. Instead of seeing exactly where objects are on the floor, you’re hoping that you know where they are, you’re hoping your most recent memory of it is accurate, you question whether your recent memory of an object location (say for something that can move, a pile of books for example) is the actual real location of them and that you hadn’t moved it since. You then recall how many times recently you moved it.

Slowly your eyes begin to adjust to the wealth of ambient light. Light leaking in from the edges of curtained windows or indeed uncurtained windows. Standby power LEDs on appliances, digital clocks, the blinking notification light of a phone. The visual definition of space is transformed and you begin to perceive it in perhaps not an entirely different way, but certainly one that overlays the existing memory of the space in daylight/electrical light.

It is an amazing experience and I do it often. I could ramble on about changing perspectives and what it can/might/be contorted to mean (and I’m likely to at some point in the future) but just give it a try.

Just don’t sue me if you fall over something. The whole idea is to move slowly. Slow right down. Actually that’s a big part of it. I wonder if you could move at the same speed during the day or under lights. I suspect full visual reference compels full speed movement and shortens patience. When you turn off the lights, have a think about just how fast you’re navigating space.