Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
On Friday, we went back to the cinema for the first time in more than a year. My wife and I are both huge movie nerds. This was a big deal for us. Nothing beats the excitement of getting there early to watch the trailers. You just don’t get that in your living room. We can’t wait to go back.
I hope you enjoy this 19th edition of the Practical Polymath. And if you do, tell a friend!
Until next week,
Florian
On Noticing
I watched a movie the other night. The main character, Edee, loses everything she holds dear. She decides to leave civilization behind and look for solace in the Canadian wilderness. With no hunting skills and dwindling canned food reserves, she quickly ends up starving. A hunter rescues Edee from a certain death. After she’s recovered he asks her: “have you thought about what you want your life to be, moving forward?”.
“I want to notice more”, she replies.
There is something trivial about noticing. And yet Edee’s longing tells us there may be something more unattainable about the act of becoming aware.
Perhaps noticing has different layers.
The first layer helps us stay alive, it’s primal. The honk of a car alerts us that it’s time to step back from the edge of the pavement. The dotted yellow line reminds us we’re too close to the train tracks.
The second layer is cognitive. Anything that deviates from our notion of how things should be catches our attention. A spelling mistake, the AC doing a weird sound, a blinking light bulb.
There is a third layer. A deeper, more out of reach form of noticing. We get there when we decide to pay attention to what’s irrelevant, what’s out of our way. What is not screaming for our attention.
This is my favorite type of noticing because it serves absolutely no goal whatsoever. Pursuing it is an act of rebellion.
It matters because when we notice beyond our needs, we give meaning to a fragment of space. We collect a sliver of time which otherwise slips through our fingers like water.
I have no immediate plans to go live into the wild. But I’ve been thinking about ways of practicing this third, deeper layer of observation.
One thing I’m experimenting with is snapping pictures of mundane and easily dismissed objects of our everyday life. They often hide interesting symmetries and textures.
These are some pieces from my gallery of the ordinary.
No need to go out in the wilderness. There’s beauty right around the corner from you. If you choose to notice it.
Weekly Wisdom
👤This is Water: “Subdue the I”. This was one of the 18 tenets we had to repeat at the beginning of our Kung Fu class. Reading David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement speech “This is Water” reminded me of that tenet. He talks about our deeply ingrained conviction that each one of us is at the center of the universe and everybody else is just in the way. Freedom, to him, was the ability to liberate yourself from that kind of thinking.
☕ Coffee Lids Design: Designer Louise Hartman and architect Scott Hecht have the largest coffee lid collection in the world. They became fascinated by the different designs and innovations that this ordinary piece of plastic went through in the last two decades. In this video, Hartman talks about “visual literacy”, the act of noticing mundane objects like your toothbrush or your toaster and wonder about the design process behind it.
Lateral Thought
“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
David Foster Wallace
Thought provoking post dude. I think our attention is the main thing that we need to regain control of to notice more.
Another way of practicing the deeper layer of "noticing" is to look up (and not only from our phones). E.g. when walking in the street, there is so much interesting stuff happening (architecture, different colours, perspectives) above eye level.