The Benefits Of Staring Out The Window

It’s 2:30 pm and you have a vague feeling you should be working on that slide deck that’s been sitting open, unaltered, on your desktop for the past 72 hrs. 

Instead, you’re staring blankly out of the office window, drifting somewhere else, consciousness dropping in and out of Gary’s latest crusade with the sales team on the importance of file-naming conventions. 

You’re wasting time…you think. You should be working, right? Working is when people can see you staring at your screen and making tapping sounds with your fingers on those small plastic squares with letters in front of you…right? 

But there’s something about staring out the window that just calms your mind…something that just makes things feel that little bit clearer and your ideas come to you more smoothly. 

Zhuangzhi called staring into space mind-fasting; Plato compared the ideas inside our heads to birds fluttering around an aviary. We need moments of purpose-free calm to allow the birds to settle and ideas to come forward. It’s something philosophers have known for centuries, but in our productivity-obsessed society, we rarely get time to stop and think because “stopping”, even for a moment, is the enemy. We battle traffic, sweaty trains, and crowded elevators on our commute to spend our day juggling calls, meetings, and endless emails while the work piles up. And when we get home, a stack of metaphorical (and literal) dishes from last night’s dinner sit there silently judging us from their comfort in the overflowing sink. 

We rarely take time to slow down, to reflect. That moment of staring out the window might actually be the key to giving us that little bit of space, that bit of calm our brains need to function properly. Stretching an already taut metaphor even further - at Unyoked, our whole experience is designed to be that window, to give us that time to find calm, to slow down, and to say, calmly and in our inside voice - it’s okay to do a bit of nothing for a while. 

So, if you’re feeling like you need to stare at something different for a while, or, hey, if you just want to get out into nature - we might have something for you.

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Climate Salad is collaborating with Unyoked to support founders and members with discounted access to Unyoked nature retreats and content to act as a friendly reminder to take a moment, connect with nature, and prioritise your wellbeing.