What do you see?

When I was bored as a young kid, I used to lie in the grass and look up in the sky. I would look at the clouds and the crazy shapes they would make, squinting and imagining an elephant with a long trunk or a duck floating on a lazy river of blue. In reality the images needed lots of creative imagination, but it was a fun way to pass the time. We didn’t have smartphones or tablets. We had to make our own fun.

I haven’t laid down in a bed of grass in a long time. I have supposedly more important things to do with my time now like drawing up project plans for work or cleaning the garage or writing some on my novel. In fact, the list of “adult things” on my To Do List feels like an endless loop. I know that I’ll never catch up on all of them.

When my wife and I went for a walk recently I was reminded of those quieter days of looking up at the clouds. The sky was as blue as blue can be. I felt like if I stared long enough I might get lost in the blue.

In the midst of the blue sky, there were small puffs of cotton candy-thin clouds. They looked so close that I thought I might be able to extend my arms high in the air and pull them down and mold them this way or that into whatever I wanted. I was Michelangelo and the clouds were my David sculpture.

The clouds looked like tiny cotton balls, there weren’t a lot of images. The longer I looked though the more I started to make something of the white puffs. I swore one cloud looked like dancers and a dragon costume in a Chinese New Years Celebration. The cloud swayed this way and that just like dancers in a parade. Another cloud looked like the tippy top of a bad hairpiece. I came close to asking a biker coming fast down the hill, “if someone up ahead had lost their toupee?”

For the most part, the clouds looked just like that, clouds. I wondered if I was in a strange 80s “Coming of Age” movie and had lost my touch, my ability to be a kid again and see something out of nothing. Science actually has a name for the practice. Seeing familiar objects or patterns in otherwise random or unrelated objects or patterns — like clouds, stars, or rock formations — is called pareidol. It’s our brain’s way of recognizing patterns and applying meaning to what it sees.

Take that tech! Our brains have been doing this long before Artificial Intelligence came along!

In the end, I’m not sure what to think. I just know that the temperature was close to being perfect and I was excited to be outside and enjoying myself. (Yes, it was before this latest heat wave or heat dome or whatever the meteorologists are calling it came to town.) I couldn’t completely stop mid-walk and lie on the grass looking up to the sky, like I would have as a young kid, but it was still a great moment.

Oh, yes, the joys of summer weather and being a kid — beauty and joy at its best.