La La Land?

If you don’t daydream and kind of plan things out in your imagination

you never get there. So you have to start someplace! ~ Robert Duvall

At the bank drive-through I place my check in the clear canister and wait to watch it rocket up and out of sight… then zip back down with green cash.

 I’m in no hurry. It’s a bright sunny day and I’ve nothing else to do but sit and kill time amongst the near-five-o’clock traffickers. 

My mind wanders off somewhere other than the bank where my Cherokee is parked…

Within minutes I hear a polite voice through a speaker. “Did you want to send this up to me?” I glance past the first row of cars and see the smiling teller leaning my way.

Oops, I’m thinking, facing her and saying, “Oh sorry, I’m in La La Land.”  And I push the magic button and watch my encased check zoom up up and away. Cash in hand, I drive off wondering, where was my mind?

Neil Gaiman says, “You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice what we’re doing.” Don’t we though?  

The castle-building habit, the day-dreaming habit – how it grows!

What a luxury it becomes; how we fly to its enchantments at every idle moment,

how we revel in them, steep our souls in them, intoxicate ourselves

with their beguiling fantasies – oh yes, and how soon and how easily our dream-life

and our material life become so intermingled and so fused together

that we can’t quite tell which is which anymore.  ~ Mark Twain

Early on you knew about that inner world, in fact you lived there half the time. It was quite possible to be in two places at once. You could transfer in a blink from your small classroom desk back to your mother’s womb. Could return to being alone in a pond with no other fish.  A safe warm place.

Even at six years old you intuited the necessity of solitude and its relevance to your call in life. However, there was no real solitude in the classroom unless you tuned out your actual surroundings - much like the autistic child manages to do.

And now it happens most anywhere, anytime.  Stoplights are good places to drift off while you’re sitting idle… Reading a boring book can send you downstream… walking, jogging…

And movies like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy are good launch pads. No pun.

Years ago my brother and I attended a homecoming service at our old church and sat through the most longwinded sermon ever. Stomachs growling, grownups squirming like small children…

My mind sending a mental message, pleading, begging, like Moses to Pharaoh, let my people go.

When finally the preacher set us free my brother said to me, “Every so often I found my mind wandering back to the sermon.”  

What about you?  When are you most likely to drift off to La La Land? 

Linking with Seedlings in Stone and Create with Joy