“I must have been grown up. So I didn’t notice.”
Margaret Atwood
“Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.”
James Thurber
I’m currently reading a pile (stack? library? glob? mosh?) of books about attention, awareness, curiosity, influence, mistakes, and innovation. I enjoy reading a volume of books at once so that the ideas and insights in them all mix and jumble in my head, create connections and spark interesting ideas. My current heap of books is making my spidey senses tingle around themes of living intentionally and expanding my creative abilities.
Creative ideas start with noticing. Noticing yourself. Noticing the world. Noticing problems. Noticing things normally unnoticed.
There’s a lot of people in the world who live by looking but don’t seeing. They see the tree, but not the forest, or the forest but not the individual trees. They see the stars, but not the black space enveloping them. I don’t judge or blame them at all. I’ve caught myself far too often get lost in the busyness of work and the activity of life and forget to experience and enjoy the enjoyable moments.
We love birdsong but are too busy to stop and notice the birds chirping around us.
We find the crashing waves of the ocean calming, but drown it out with our boom box blasting country hits.
We look down at the pavement when we are walking, instead of looking up at the architecture or sky above us.
One thing that writing every day has shown me is that there’s at least one lesson hidden somewhere in my day.
Sometimes I’ll wake up and know right away what the lesson will be. But most of the time I don’t know where the insight will come from, nor when I’ll receive it.
But I’ve opened my self to them. I seek out insights in my day — conversations, articles, books, surroundings. They are out there somewhere, floating in the ether. Waiting to be picked up like a satellite dish or radio tower.
There are lessons in negativity and in optimism. There are lessons in happy moments. There’s always a lesson or two in difficulty. There are lessons in stupid things.
And when you decide to listen from them, you begin to cultivate better ideas and practices for living.
STAY BOLD, Keep Pursuing,
— Josh Waggoner | Daily Blog #783
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