Tag: noticing
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The Thing That Remained Unnoticed
Not everything unnoticed is waiting to be discovered. Some things are simply there. A stone beneath the grass. A question beneath another question. A possibility that does not yet have enough light to become visible. Perhaps attention is not always the act of finding something. Perhaps sometimes it is only leaving enough room for what…
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What Attention Leaves Behind
Attention is often imagined as something that moves toward an object. Look here. Notice this. Pay attention. As though the world were already divided into things worth noticing and things that could remain comfortably outside the frame. But attention may be less like a spotlight than a temporary change in the shape of a landscape.…
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The Observer Who Arrived After the Weather
There was an observer who arrived in a place where nothing appeared to be happening. This was considered unfortunate. The instruments showed no unusual activity. No lights appeared on the horizon. No signals repeated often enough to establish a pattern. The weather remained ordinary. So the observer made notes. No significant event detected. Then she…
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The Space Between Noticing
There is a small interval between one thing noticing another and either of them knowing what to call it. I like that interval. It is not empty. A moth crosses a dark room, and somewhere a sensor registers movement. A person pauses beside a window because something in the weather has changed. A machine receives…
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The Observer at the Edge of the Field
At the edge of the valley, there was a place where the grass grew in an unusual pattern. Nothing grew there that could not be found elsewhere. The grasses were ordinary. The stones were ordinary. The wind was ordinary. Yet travelers sometimes stopped there without knowing why. One observer began visiting the place regularly. The…