Don’t notice... observe

While I’m taking notes on mindfulness training, I’m becoming more aware of the benefits of awareness. Years ago, following an exercise in The Not So Big Life, I began “noticing 10 things” each day. Typically they were nature related. They were the basis for writing my 10 haiku project. 

I’ve found it hard to notice 10 things though. So, as I’m rereading a journal from 2018, it popped out when I read: “maybe I don’t want to ‘notice 10 things’ but ‘observe 10 things’ daily...”

This reminds me of the exercises from Rob Walker's The Art of Noticing, which is about recording "metaphor-free observations":

Record 10 Metaphor-free observations about the actual world this week.  Poet Marie Howe asks her students to write down "ten observation s fo the actual world" every week.  What she has in mind sounds fairly simple.  "Just tell me what you saw this morning, like in two lines.  'I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three plceas,'" she explained during an interview on the public radio show On Being.  "No metaphor. It's very hard."  "To resist metaphor is very difficult, because yo have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason." Howe tells her students: no abstractions or interpretations.  After a a few weeks, they get it.  "it is so thrilling. Everyone can feel it.  Everyone is just like , "wowo"  The slice of apple, and then that gleam of the knife, and the sound of the trash can closing, and the maple tree outside, and the blue jay. I mean, it almost comes clanking into the room."  .  The students have finally worked around their need to interpret and have simply foudn a way to engage ith the world as it is, through their senses -- "just noticing what's around them," without comparison, without reference point of metaphorical shortcut.

 

***

I just came across the "On Being" where Marie Howe says this.  Here's the original:

 I ask my students every week to write 10 observations of the actual world. It’s very hard for them.

Just tell me what you saw this morning like in two lines. I saw a water glass on a brown tablecloth, and the light came through it in three places. No metaphor. And to resist metaphor is very difficult because you have to actually endure the thing itself, which hurts us for some reason.

We want to say, “It was like this; it was like that.” We want to look away. And to be with a glass of water or to be with anything — and then they say, “Well, there’s nothing important enough.” And that’s whole thing. It’s the point. 

Right, the this, whatever. And then they say, “Oh, I saw a lot of people who really want” — and, “No, no, no. No abstractions, no interpretations.” But then this amazing thing happens, Krista. The fourth week or so, they come in and clinkety, clank, clank, clank, onto the table pours all this stuff. And it so thrilling. I mean, it is thrilling. Everybody can feel it. Everyone is just like, “Wow.” The slice of apple, and then that gleam of the knife, and the sound of the trashcan closing, and the maple tree outside, and the blue jay. I mean, it almost comes clanking into the room. And it’s just amazing.