The Art of Noticing

I’ve been thinking about noticing.
Which, admittedly, is not exactly new around here.

But lately I’ve been wondering what makes noticing an art.

We tend to think it begins with looking more closely. Paying better attention. Training ourselves to spot the beautiful thing everyone else walked past.

I’m not sure it does.

I think it begins much closer to home.

With our own little corners of the world.

I have a friend, Andrea, who uses that phrase—my little corner of the world. I like it.

Because we all have one.

The rooms we move through every day. The streets we walk. The people and creatures we share our days with. The things we pass so often we hardly see them anymore.
The view from the kitchen window.
The chair where the afternoon light lands.
The recipe in someone else’s handwriting left on the counter.
A bird on the wire outside.
The sound the screen door makes when it closes.
The particular green of late September.
The coffee cup you reach for more often than all the others.

This is your little corner of the world.
And no one sees it quite the way you do.

That might be my favorite thing about noticing.
Two people can walk the same street and come home having been in entirely different places.

One saw the gardens.
One saw the cracks in the sidewalk.
One noticed every dog.
One noticed the old houses and wondered who used to live there.
One came home with a red leaf in her pocket.

We notice according to some inner compass we don't entirely understand.

Our eyes keep finding certain things.
Our curiosity keeps tugging us in certain directions.

And slowly, if we're paying attention, a little world begins to emerge.
Ours.

You begin to discover that you have an eye.
You have preferences.
You have things that keep calling you back.

Maybe you notice shadows.
Maybe you notice old signs and handwritten notes and things tucked into cracks in walls.
Maybe you notice what people leave behind.
Maybe you notice seedpods.
Maybe you notice what is on the nightstand beside your bed.
Maybe you keep photographing the same crooked tree every time you walk past it without realizing you've been doing it for three years.

There is no correct collection.

And I think that's where noticing becomes an art.

Not when we get better at seeing everything.
When we begin to recognize what we see.

An artist doesn't simply look harder than everyone else. She develops a relationship with what catches her attention. She follows it. Returns to it. Wonders about it.

Sometimes she makes something from it.
Sometimes she simply keeps it.

A photograph.
A sentence.
A scrap of paper.
A color mixed in the margin of a notebook.
A tiny acorn slipped into a pocket.

Small evidence of a life being lived in one particular corner of the world.

I was here.
I saw this.
This is what caught my eye.

Maybe that's why I've become so interested in collecting these ordinary bits of our lives.

Not because our days need to become more beautiful or meaningful or Instagrammable.
Quite the opposite.
Our little corners are already full of material.
And when we begin noticing what belongs to ours—the colors, objects, repetitions, peculiarities, people, places and tiny moments—we begin making a kind of record.

Not of everything that happened.
Of what we saw.

Maybe that is the art of noticing.
Not noticing more.
Not trying to pay attention to everything.
Just becoming curious about what keeps catching your eye in your own little corner of the world.
And following it.

Come sit at The Table

This is what we'll be exploring at The Table in October: The Art of Noticing.

We'll gather around the virtual table with our coffee or tea and spend some time looking at our own little corners of the world—and at the things that keep asking for our attention.

There will be something to think about, something to make, and plenty of room for conversation.

You don't need to arrive inspired.
You only need to arrive curious.

Because I suspect there's already something you've been noticing.
Let's see where it leads.