On Looking

“You missed that. Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you. You are missing the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you. By marshaling your attention to these words, helpfully framed in a distinct border of white, you are ignoring an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses: the hum of the fluorescent lights, the ambient noise in a large room, the places your chair presses against your legs or back, your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, the tension you are holding in your shoulders or jaw, the map of the cool and warm places on your body, the constant hum of traffic or a distant lawnmower, the blurred view of your own shoulders and torso in your peripheral vision, a chirp of a bug or whine of a kitchen appliance.” (Horowitz) 

I think this quote is very eye catching, it makes you think almost immediately; if you were anything like me, you took a double take and decided to look up and around you, just to prove the writer wrong, or to prove a point. It quite interesting that we don’t really think about anything outside of who we are and what we do. We can be selfish and self-important, and we don’t really do it on purpose, we are just so caught up in our lives that we forget that, things happen, the wind blows, the flowers grow, people stare; and anecdote that i experienced that proves this is how I met my boyfriend. 

Four years ago, I went on a trip to Boston where I stayed with my aunt (and godmother) for around five months, kind of as a method and moment of distraction from the things going on in my life then. I really liked books and anything to do with writing so my aunt gave me my little cousins library card to keep (because she didn’t use it), so I because Andy for five months. During that time I went almost daily there, from open to close, and I read over twenty books, while I did, I never noticed someone looking at me from far away. Turns out he had been mastering up the courage to talk to me, and here we are, three years in. 

We don’t look at the small things because we cannot seem to give them enough importance, even though there are occasion where the small things are what makes the moment; my family is relatively fast walkers (including me) but sometimes I like to say “lets slow down and smell the flowers”, to kind of tell them to look around and feel the wind and the sun on their faces. Whats the point of being self involved and “living your own life” all the time? The world deserved to be looked at, we can let such beauty go unnoticed forever. 

Work Cited

Horowitz, Alexandra. Amateur Eyes. http://www.nicenet.org/ICA/class/document_show.cfm?do cument_id=2186116