Find one thing you've never noticed
Making a point of paying attention makes life more interesting
I love routines. They make good choices automatic. However, if you’re not careful, they can make time mindless.
Consider your weekday commute. If you drive the same route to work or your kids’ schools multiple mornings a week, it is soon possible to make the whole drive without even thinking. You look up and you’re at your office. An hour of your life might just have disappeared.
So here’s a way to jolt yourself out of this stupor: Aim to notice just one thing today that you have never noticed before.
The world is a varied place. There are many details in it, and so you can imagine all the new things you might see if you tried. Maybe it’s that a word on a sign is misspelled. Maybe it’s that a house near that intersection where you wait for the bus every morning has a bright red door. I drive by my local library and an adjacent shopping center almost every day and I’d never noticed these vertical design elements on top of their roofs until I happened to look up.
Even if you work from home you might notice something, especially as the weather drifts toward spring. Apparently there is a weeping cherry growing in the woods by my yard that I didn’t know about until it started blossoming. When we started renovating our current house — and thus thinking about things like door design — I actually looked at the doors in my old house. Even though I walked through those things dozens of times per day, I couldn’t have drawn them. With my awareness raised, it was like I was seeing for the first time.
In any case, you won’t know what you’ll notice until you look. But the process of trying to look will nudge you into a more mindful state. Today’s commute, or lunch, or work-from-home break will be different. So try to notice something you haven’t before. By itself that can make a day more memorable.