Noticing
In this episode we explore why it’s important to build a habit of noticing the small things around us…
What do you notice? What do you see?
For example, you’re driving down a back-road in country Victoria, some miles out from the nearest town, and you notice an unexpected glint of gold high up amongst the trees way off to the right. Curious, and with a bit of time to spare, you decide to turn onto the even smaller side-road that heads that way. You turn a corner, and then, without apparent warning, you’re greeted by this:
It’s enormous: at least a hundred feet high, maybe more. You can see the sheer scale of the thing from the tiny-seeming person walking along that central path.
It’s an interesting place: there’s a lot to explore here, if you wish. And yes, there are good reasons why it’s way out there in what may seem like the middle-of-nowhere.
Yet you only found it because you noticed that glint of gold amongst the trees. And then took the effort to follow up on that small hint.
So that’s the point here: how do you notice? How do you build a habit of noticing? And why might it be important to do so?
The why is fairly straightforward: in essence, it’s the same as we saw in the episode ‘The quiet ones’, in that the most important issues tend to get drowned out by the sheer noise and conceptual clutter of the everyday. Given that tendency, it becomes all too easy to end up focusing on the things that matter the least, and miss the small quiet things that matter the most. Not A Good Idea…
If we’re to work well with the big changes that are coming our way, we need to get better at noticing those ‘small quiet things’. We need to learn how to shut out that noise of the world, and become more aware of the subtleties in our surrounds.
And that kind of noticing is a real skill - so how do we get better at doing it? Short-answer: practice on the small things that probably don’t matter, until you find yourself noticing the things that do.
A disciplined practice of noticing.
But it’s a discipline that doesn’t look like much discipline. That’s where this can get tricky…
I used to teach all of this stuff fifty years ago, working with would-be water-diviners and the like. (If you want to see what that looks like, watch the earlier parts of the Russell Crowe film ‘The Water-Diviner’, finding water with a couple of bits of fencing-wire and anything else he can use - it’s pretty accurate.) The theory-part is really simple: you can learn most of that in just a couple of minutes. But to get it to work - to get real results, which, yes, most of my students did - then you need the practice, and the discipline.
In theory, so to speak, the discipline isn’t hard: all you have to do is notice. But the reason why it takes a fair bit of practice is because it requires a really delicate balance. If don’t try hard enough, you won’t get results. And if you try too hard, you also won’t get results. But if you can get that balance just right, and hold that balance just right… - well that’s when you start noticing things that you wouldn’t otherwise see. Useful things: things that can contribute to useful change…
Yet you can also do it just for fun, for art, for ideas and insights, for everyday enlightenment. It’s basically the same discipline of noticing, just applied in somewhat different ways.
For example, there’s the French practice of flânerie, dating back to the mid-19th century. A flâneur is ‘one who saunters around observing society’ - noticing people, and noticing small details about those people. Lots of us do that anyway, of course, especially in the city: but if you do it in that more disciplined way, you’ll notice a lot more.
Then there’s psychogeography - also originally originally French, but much more widespread now. It’s basically the same as flânerie, but less about people, more about noticing the city itself: ‘the exploration of urban environments that emphasises interpersonal connections to places and arbitrary routes, and follows a loosely defined urban practice known as the dérive’ (literally, ‘the drift’).
There’s another variant called archaeography. Again, much the same discipline, but more about the landscape, particularly as viewed with an archaeologist’s eye, and often with the aim of capturing it somehow in photography and other artforms. (Disclaimer: I did a book on this back in 2009, with co-author Liz Poraj-Wilczynska, working mainly on sites in the Cotswolds region in England, and with a particular focus on the disciplines of noticing.)
And then there’s perhaps my real favourite, the work on particularity, local-distinctiveness and ‘spirit of place’ by Sue Clifford and Angela King at Common Ground UK. Take a wander through their work on ‘parish maps’, or their ‘rules for local-distinctiveness’ and the matching poster - these are explorations that anyone can do, anywhere, to build their skills in noticing.
Let’s have a look at some real examples…
What does all of this look like in practice? And why would you bother? Well, for example, you’d probably want to be able to notice this chap - dangling between the bushes, exactly at head-height - before you walk straight into its web…
Once you’ve got over the shock of that, you may have opened your eyes a bit more to what’s happening around you - and start to notice.
For instance, you might take a wander through the tree-litter of the small forest round the back of my current house - and you notice this. It’s only about an inch or so tall, probably the home of one of the larger spider-species here:
And if you look down at your feet, there’s an incredible array of different patterns and colours and more, where all the different layers and types of underlying rock come through to the bare surface of the forest:
Or maybe go out to more open countryside, and take a walk along the old railway that I talked about in the episode ‘Maintain’. If you allow yourself to notice, there are all manner of quietly-interesting items out there, such as this small plant bravely breaking its way through the ballast:
Or, almost hidden behind the greyness of the broken blocks of ballast, a tiny spot of colour:
Notice.
Notice.
Allow yourself to notice.
And once you get used to noticing the small quiet things like these, you’ll start to notice other kinds of small things, likewise hidden-in-plain-sight amongst the everyday. Things at work. Things about people. Things about the wider world, and what we can do to change what needs changing, to change what’s wrong and make things right.
So yes, noticing. A very useful skill to build…