Escaping the Threshold: The Therapeutic Experience

-

 

Ever since the lockdown, millions of people have been effectively confined to their homes, with a sudden change in their daily routine and leaving themselves alone with their thoughts. I was having a hard time adjusting to the new routine as well. I was not at all used to sitting back at home alone. Neither was I used to being with my family for the entire day and giving an explanation for each and every action of mine. Therefore I decided to take care of myself before it got worse. To achieve the peace of my mind, I had to escape from my daily life to heal myself. The illustration is a map showing all the activities that I started doing after the lockdown started to and that helped me get through.

I woke up very early in the morning and escaped my house on my bike with a friend. Waking up early makes one's mind fresh and active. We went to faraway places to the outskirts of the city on our bikes to leave behind the city’s aura of the pandemic. While doing so we tried to take routes which would connect us to nature more. Routes with more greenery, water bodies and beautiful landscapes. We finally would find a good spot to stop, sit and do yoga for 20 to 30 minutes. Performing yoga within the natural landscapes helped in achieving another level of peace. One final thing with which we ended our little escape was to communicate. Talking to someone about your problems always helps you in getting through them. The entire experience ended up, somewhat playing the role of therapy in my life, throughout the lockdown period and helped escape the threshold of the restriction of my household. 


Ketki Nandanwar

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Kid Mapping

-
Image
The past 3-4 months have been crucial for everybody staying home, but mostly the kids who had a hard time staying home and not enjoying their vacations or their day of the school. In the following plan of my aunt's house, I mapped the average amount of time spent by my 4-year-old brother in each room around the house. This mapping shows his time spent in a day and the safety threshold. The colours signify the amount of time spent, red being the highest and blue being the lowest, yellow is mediocre. His daily activities included, the meal timing, watch tv, studying for an hour, playing, etc. The lines dividing the rooms which act as walls are basically the thresholds of the place according to safety. The deeper we go into the home the privacy increases, similarly, the living room is the first room which comes in contact with the outsiders, rather than the bedroom. Muskaan Mansuri
Read more

Evershine City, Vasai

-
Image
The street is originally a secondary street in a quiet neighbourhood in Evershine City, Vasai, Maharashtra. The street is surrounded by housing societies on both sides and is devoid of much activity. In the photomontage, I transformed the street into a place nature meets technology. There is thick vegetation on one side, and apartment blocks and monorail on the other. Several people can be seen, a man riding a scooter, two others in formals, a man sitting very close to a crocodile, two kids going about their daily life, This is a scenario where all kinds of people live together, where there are no divisions such as village dwellers or city dwellers. One can also see animals and humans freely going about their lives without fear of each other, they coexist peacefully. Priya Thottappally  
Read more

Week 2: THRESHOLD MAPS

-
While the Week 1 exercise, Everyday-X was about creating an 'audio walk' where you experience the everyday life of the city and reflect upon it, the Week 2 exercise was about mapping thresholds. It meant drawing upon the memories of the last 3-4 months of being in the pandemic situation and how we have changed the way we inhabit spaces - spaces of our homes, our neighbourhoods. The maps were meant to reflect a typical day during the lockdown period or what one thought was a typical day for one's neighbours, or a map that brought out experiences on the personal front or one's thoughts as a designer during these times. The MAP had to be based on the idea of 'Thresholds'. This could be a physical threshold - between oneself and one's family, one's neighbours or one's schoolmates. It could be a social threshold. It could mean a crossing of boundaries. It could also draw upon the idea that we are today at the threshold of a global change/outlook towards
Read more