Thursday, January 22, 2009

Astonish Yourself

The following are from Roger-Pol Droit's book Astonish Yourself! 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life (2003).
  1. Call yourself
  2. Empty a word of its meaning
  3. Look in vain for "I"
  4. Make the world last twenty minutes
  5. See the stars below you
  6. See a landscape as a stretched canvas
  7. Lose something and not know what
  8. Recall where you were this morning
  9. Hurt yourself briefly
  10. Feel eternal
  11. Telephone at random
  12. Rediscover your room after a journey
  13. Drink while urinating
  14. Make a wall between your hands
  15. Walk in the dark
  16. Dream of all the places in the world
  17. Peel an apple in your head
  18. Visualize a pile of human organs
  19. Imagine yourself high up
  20. Imagine your imminent death
  21. Try to measure existence
  22. Count to a thousand
  23. Dread the arrival of the bus
  24. Run in a graveyard
  25. Play the fool
  26. Watch a woman at her window
  27. Invent lives for yourself
  28. Look at people from a moving car
  29. Follow the movement of ants
  30. Eat a nameless substance
  31. Watch dust in the sun
  32. Resist tiredness
  33. Overeat
  34. Play the animal
  35. Contemplate a dead bird
  36. Come across a childhood toy
  37. Wait while doing nothing
  38. Try not to think
  39. Go to the hairdresser
  40. Shower with your eyes closed
  41. Sleep on your front in the sun
  42. Go to the circus
  43. Try on clothes
  44. Calligraphize
  45. Light a fire in the hearth
  46. Be aware of yourself speaking
  47. Weep at the cinema
  48. Meet up with friends after several years
  49. Browse at the bookseller's
  50. Become music
  51. Pull out a hair
  52. Walk in an imaginary forest
  53. Demonstrate on your own
  54. Stay in the hammock
  55. Invent headlines
  56. Listen to short-wave radio
  57. Turn off the sound on the TV
  58. Redisover a childhood scene that seemed larger
  59. Get used to eating something you don't like
  60. Fast for a while
  61. Rant for ten minutes
  62. Drive through a forest
  63. Give without thinking about it
  64. Look for a blue food
  65. Become a saint or sinner
  66. Recover lost memories
  67. Watch someone sleeping
  68. Work on a holiday
  69. Consider humanity to be an error
  70. Inhabit the planet of small gestures
  71. Disconnect the phone
  72. Smile at a stranger
  73. Enter the space of a painting
  74. Leave the cinema in daytime
  75. Plunge into cold water
  76. Seek out immutable landscapes
  77. Listen to a recording of your voice
  78. Tell a stranger she is beautiful
  79. Believe in the existence of a smell
  80. Wake up without knowing where
  81. Descend an interminable staircase
  82. Swallow your emotion
  83. Fix the ephemeral
  84. Decorate a room
  85. Laugh at an idea
  86. Vanish at a pavement cafe
  87. Row on a lake in your room
  88. Prowl at night
  89. Become attached to an object
  90. Sing the praises of Santa Claus
  91. Play with a child
  92. Encounter pure chance
  93. Recite the telephone directory on your knees
  94. Think about what other people are doing
  95. Practice make-believe everywhere
  96. Kill people in your head
  97. Take the subway without going anywhere
  98. Remove your watch
  99. Put up with a chatterbox
  100. Clean up after the party
  101. Find the infinitesimal caress
Try doing one a day.

No comments:

Post a Comment