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original cut:

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Manifesto:
Blink: A Meditation

It is premeditated. You know what to do. You look at a piece of paper, pick it up, hold it within purview and start writing. Expectations of what you might scribble have already constructed themselves in the cobwebs of your mind. You anticipate writing about a film project and its constituents. This is routine[1]. It is an assignment, it is something you are required to do, something that you have to write, read or assess. It does not have to be conscious; it just has to be done. You flip through your notes, words jump out at you and you feel an overwhelming urge to hold them in your palm and let them flow through your pen to paper. Your lips emit verbal diarrhea, attempting to lock into words of cumulative meaning, the knowledge we absorb week after week. Jargon, technicalities, industry speak: synchronousextradiegeticinterpellationintertextsemioticsmiseenscenesymbollongtake.

Not this time though, no, no, no.

This time you will take it slow. You will pause amidst the madness and chaos that is the daily routine we live and perform. You will open your eyes in the morning but not like you’ve done everyday for the past six thousand nine hundred and thirty five days[2]. You will open your eyes with the awareness that you are an intelligent, living, breathing miracle. As you, one in twenty four hundred, brush your teeth, get dressed looking out over the Vermont countryside, walk out into the invariably brisk air, you realize that even though your actions feel mundane, routine, and ordinary, it “doesn’t make [your] actions meaningless.” You will pause before you make the beeline for the cereals to beam a quick smile at the workers who put breakfast together for you. You are entirely encapsulated in the March breeze, drifting towards a classroom where knowledge is served on a shiny silver platter for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

You will live, entirely and exuberantly in the silences. In the spaces between the series of seemingly mundane actions and events that clutter your every day, you will seek solace. In those moments, you will be fully conscious of the footsteps you leave behind as you wander into new terrain, shoe shaped holes in deep earth. You will listen to minute melodies as they wrap themselves around you: doors creaking, a clock ticking away, students laughing at a distance, clatter of plates, sighs. As darkness settles into its comfy bed, so do you beneath your aqua sheets.

And that’s when you realize, “the world doesn’t just disappear when you close your eyes.” You don’t miss a thing when you blink, you only see farther and farther into the mysteries of tomorrows.

Free yourself from the rout(e) you are stuck in.

Conceived by:

Jacquelyn Breckenridge

Spencer Petterson

Alexandra Edel

Rhubini Kunasegaran