Noticing

I wake up early, well before sunrise winter and summer. After coffee and some reading or writing, I take my dog Milo for a walk before going for a run or biking to the gym. I love being out as the new day begins. Birdsong is the aubade of that holy hour, the dew-wet vegetation the incense, my neighborhood the sanctuary, and I the sole parishioner, celebrating matins. A haiku:
Rising before dawn
Sleep cleansed I look to the east
Where hope glows softly

The theme of this essay is not the dawn, however, but rather it is about noticing.

Being out at dawn, the sights, sounds, and smells I encounter are distinct and not masked by the glare, clamor, and distractions of the day at full throttle. In the serenity of the dawn hour, it is easier to notice the details and variegations of what lies around us, not just the natural world but the artifacts that comprise our built environment. Yet, as we become entrained in bustle of the day, it becomes harder to see and appreciate the details of our surroundings, and we are the lesser for it. Tolstoy understood the importance of noticing when he said, “In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.” Yes, indeed, to apprehend the world around us, we must stop what we are doing and open ourselves to what we see, hear, and smell. Life is in the details!

In addition to the distractions of merely getting through the day itself in this complex society, there is something else at play that stifles our ability to notice. It is the tendency for many of us to wrap ourselves in cocoons of distraction and entertainment, e.g., the ubiquitous earphones of people walking, jogging, or at the gym— funneling music, news, podcasts, or Ted Talks. Even more distracting and addictive is the “smart phone.” Often when I ride the bus or am at the gym, it seems as though more than half of the other people are looking at their phone rather than engaging the world at hand.

If we are diverted by such things, how can we really experience the world? With ear buds delivering music or words how can we hear glorious birdsong? With our attention hijacked by news or videos or email or texts, how can we apprehend the details that remind us we are alive, that give texture to our lives? These high tech gizmos are not so much tools that extend our reach as they are prophylactics that isolate us from the larger world and deaden our sensation of it.

Moreover, if our interaction with the world is mediated too much through the popular culture that comes to us through ear buds or the screens of our phones, we become merely consumers of (or are consumed by) that culture, and thus we forfeit our own identity. We become objects rather than agents.

One of the more interesting books I have read in the past year addresses this topic. It is “Outside Lies Magic” by John R. Steptoe. This quote captures the spirit of the book:
“The whole concatenation of wild and artificial things, the natural ecosystem as modified by people over the centuries, the built environment layered over layers, the eerie mix of sounds and smells and glimpses neither natural nor crafted- all of it is free for the taking, for the taking in. Take it, take it in, take in more every weekend, every day, and quickly it becomes the theater that intrigues, relaxes, fascinates, seduces, and above all expands any mind focused on it. Outside lies utterly ordinary space open to any casual explorer willing to find the extraordinary. Outside lies unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity. Outside lies magic.”

This verse from a poem by Dana Gioia also gets at this idea:
Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica.
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper–
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

To look allows us to notice, to notice allows us to see, to see allows us to name, and to name allows us to know.