The Art of Noticing

July 4, 20263 min read

I have become the kind of person who notices things. This was not a decision so much as a slow surrender. Somewhere in my thirties the world stopped rushing past and started, occasionally, to hold still, and I found I had time to look at it.

The practice of standing still

Noticing is not a talent. It is closer to a habit, or maybe a refusal, the small daily refusal to treat the ordinary as furniture. You do not need special equipment. You need to be willing to look like someone with nowhere to be. I keep a note on my phone titled things.txt where I write down one thing I saw that day, and the rule, the only rule, is that it cannot be important.

Noticing is not the same as documenting. The camera, bless it, has convinced us that the way to keep a thing is to capture it. But a photograph is a receipt, not the meal. Some days the note is a heron. Some days it is the way light comes through a dirty window and makes the dust look like it is ~~showing off~~ celebrating. Most days it is nothing you would call remarkable, which is, I think, the entire point.

A short, unremarkable inventory from last week:

The sound a house makes when it thinks you have left.

The specific grey of the sky in the minute before it decides to rain.

How long a stranger holds a door, and whether they look at you while they do it.

A small experiment

If you want to try this, and I am not saying you should, here is the version that worked for me. It takes about a week to stop feeling ridiculous.

Pick a thing you pass every day and have never once looked at.

Look at it. Not for a photo. Not for a caption. Just look.

Keep at it until you find something you did not know was there. It happens faster than you expect.

Attention, Simone Weil wrote, is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

This is a window I have walked past for six years. Last Tuesday I finally looked at it instead of through it.

Soft light through an old window — Six years. It turns out the frame is blue.

The one rule

There is only one way to do this wrong, and it is to turn it into a project. The moment noticing becomes a system with streaks and goals and a dashboard, it stops being noticing and becomes one more thing to be behind on. If it helps, think of it as a very small function with no return value you can measure:

notice.js

function notice(thing) {
  // no metrics, no streak, no reward
  return look(thing, { forAsLongAsItTakes: true });
}

What noticing gives back

The strange part is that it does give something back, though never on demand and never quite the thing you were hoping for. Mostly it gives back time, or the feeling of it. A day with three noticed things in it is longer than a day with none, even though the clock will argue otherwise.

Here is the most-clicked piece of bait on the internet. You already know it. Watch ten seconds anyway, and try to hear the song instead of the joke. Noticing the overfamiliar, it turns out, is the hardest noticing there is.

I still watch the kettle. It still takes ninety seconds. I have stopped trying to make those ninety seconds useful, and in exchange they have started to feel like mine. That is the trade, and it is a good one.

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