Observing

Observing is one of the most authentic, beautiful, subtle and overlooked aspect of our lives, of active living, of being alive.

But it’s also hard, easy to miss, and to lose the habit of. (I believe it has always been hard. Not only now, with overflow of information.)

So how can I foster that habit and skill in me? How can I nurture it? Incentivize it? Active observation is so much different than passive going by.

There are so many different things to observe, different levels and angles. What we can see, what we can feel, what someone really means, what society is doing, what arrangements of buildings are in front of our eyes, how certain words were used together in a way we never stopped to think about.

The tiny window into existence that is our brain and our senses is the great blessing that makes observing possible.

There’s a universe outside our minds. There’s another one, private and inaccessible to others, inside, connected only by these narrow channels of perception

Ideas, concepts and all things, are too big for any of these tiny windows. Always bigger. The best we can do is assemble and disassemble, slice them into smaller pieces that might fit through these narrow passages.

We’re the archaeologists of a universe happening in real time. We work as paleontologists finding dinosaur pieces, unlabeled, messy, spread out and we have to figure out how to put it back together.

Some ideas are simpler or more common. They’re common enough that we recognize the pattern, know how the pieces fit. Others are puzzles we’ve been unconsciously collecting for years, never realizing the fragments belonged together.

Yet even the common ones carry some danger, a silent one. In our automatic assembly of these mental pieces, we might never realize they could fit together differently. We place structural importance on elements that may be unnecessary, or ignore essential pieces simply because our initial construction didn’t require them. And there was no one inside our minds to tell us that we might be wrong — whatever “wrong” even means in this context.

Maybe that’s why expressing our ideas back are so important to being a great observer. Through feedback we’re forced to keep playing with them, to handle them differently. This might explain why artists, writers and actors often excel at noticing. They take the pieces they’re given and play with them, rearrange them, examine them from new angles. Because there’s no real observation without playing with the pieces you’re given.

Then again, maybe that’s just a bias. There may be way more great observers in the world. But how can we know about it if they don’t express it?

What about language? What part does it play in our observations and intepretation of the world? I don’t mean it in a “how the language you speak affects your brain” way. But how does language fit in our working minds?

Is language the enabler that makes it possible for us to observe and think? Or is it a lens, that makes the image clearer, not the enabler itself? Is it a stepping stone, or the foundational rock? Is it thinking itself? Is language always involved, even if not clearly?

Too many questions and I haven’t addressed the one that made me start writing all of this. How can I foster the habit of better observing?

Intentionality and incentive might be the key. What if we regularly challenged ourselves and others to truly see? Why not ask “what do you see?” more often?

Not everyone can take this question seriously. Not everyone realize they’re not seeing all there is. But some will pause. Some will take the challenge, stop and think. Some might show you pieces you’d placed incorrectly or ignored entirely.

Besides asking, we can also be more vocal of what we see. Others might be surprised by our interpretation, and question it. That reaction might be the catalyst, the enabler, of deeper observing.

Maybe we should also learn to observe the observers. Come to think of it, only considering actors, writers and artists good observers is in itself a lack of true observance. People make observations and remarks about the world all the time. We might overlook profound insights simply because they don’t fit our mental model of what observation looks like or who we expect to provide it.

“The way we think is entirely based on mentally chopping up the world into discrete entities—things and concepts—pretending they are less connected with everything else than they really are, and forgetting, at least for a while, the details inside them”

Shake Up Your Boundaries

Another great and provoking piece from Marco: Visualizing Framings

The video that sparked me into start writing this post: Why Write Fiction (if you’ll probably never be published)?