Notes from the hammock
“A hammock is like a steady drip of morphine, without the danger of renal failure.”
Your personality determines optimal conditions for cultivating your best ideas. High performance people are hit with mental lightning bolts whilst running. Creative thinkers make connections at “non-productive” play. Contemplative types fire neurons in the shower, the most common incubator of original thoughts.
What does it say about me that I do my thinking in a hammock?
A hammock is shorthand for lazy. Designed for relaxing, its job is to suspend your body above the ground and your brain from active pursuits. The hammock’s natural Caribbean habitat has launched a million screensavers – hanging on a sandy beach against peacock hued seas and supported by obliging palm trees. A ropey chaise best paired with a beach read, cocktail or nap, the hammock is a universal symbol for escaping reality and turning your mind off.
But the transformational power of a hammock should not be underestimated. With a 90° rotation, it quite literally changes our perspective on the world. While a hammock doesn’t exactly fight gravity, it teases physics and makes us feel more buoyant. Gentle swinging wields an immediate calming effect, allowing us to find equilibrium between whatever forces are at odds.
Or as conspiracy theorist Dale on the soon to be revived King of the Hill said, “A hammock is like a steady drip of morphine, without the danger of renal failure.”
The hammock in my back garden won’t set Instagram aflame – it’s some knotty blue rope strung between two humble but perfectly hammockable coconut palms. (Yes, it should be a word.) But for me it’s a set piece surrounded by nature’s stylized staging. Flopping into it cues a previously unheard soundtrack of harmonized rustling palm leaves against a baseline of lapping canal with the occasional percussive thwack of our Caymanian flag. Silhouetted by the low-lying sun, shadows waltz underneath it while light dances on water at the eyeline. Clouds scurry past, chased by the warm soft breeze that renders the sky into an up-tempo time lapse.
My hammock is a cocoon from which the world recedes. Time slows; a sense of space, privacy and nature amplifies. Thoughts flow, coalescing into nascent ideas. Most are random, some are silly, but on a rare occasion, one might flirt with profundity.
If it does I’ll share it here.