notice.

I’ve been reading Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem slowly. To be honest, I’ve been reading it since last summer. It’s not that I don’t like it, but when you have a large stack of books you’re reading, you have to pick one at a time. This one kept slipping to the bottom of the pile. I’m embarrassed because I feel that I'm exactly the sort of person who's supposed to be very well read in Joan Didion and I should love her.

At any rate, I’m in the last pages now. It turns out this collection makes good bus reading, i.e. I can read it in 10-15 minute chunks without feeling uncomfortable. Also, I’ve been reading it much more quickly since I got to her essay, On Keeping a Notebook. I got excited because she describes what I’ve always felt was a weird habit of mine: I observe things, remember an alarming number of details, and write them down. I don’t know why or for what. I write down pieces of conversation I hear on the bus. I write down that I saw an old man slowly get off his bike yesterday and push it across the street. I write down the color of the pavement outside the window of my office and how the color changes with the rain.

From time to time I think that these pieces will all come together someday into a story? an essay? a poem? But the truth is, they’ll probably just live on indefinitely in my retired notebooks. Didion says that this practice is important not for remembering details, but for remembering who you were when you observed the details. I dig that. My contribution is that I think it’s important because it makes observation a practice. In a world full of distraction and masses of faces glued to phones (soapbox?) it’s useful to remember how much you can hear and see just by looking up and looking around.

Every day surprises me. Two weeks ago, on a walk, I saw a man teaching his child to ride a bike. I walked behind them for a minute before I darted around the wobbling training wheels. A few blocks later, I came up on a woman in a business suit and heels, chasing her kid down the street, also teaching him to ride a bike. Two completely different people, one simple act of learning. I like moments like that. It feels like the universe saying thank you for noticing.

We all get lost in the noise sometimes. There’s a lot of it out there, buzzing in our faces and ears and eyes, stealing our thoughts, wasting our time. I hope you know what I mean. In the midst of that, I’ve been trying this little trick lately, stolen straight from this lovely post at Design for Mankind.

Whenever I find myself saying, “I don’t have time,” I mentally re-word the phrase into, “That’s just not a high priority for me right now.”

No one has time for everything, but everyone has time to choose which things are important. I forget that sometimes. Every moment is about the balance. Amidst the noise, it's important for me to notice two strangers teaching their kids to ride bikes. Noticing is important.