I've kind of forgotten what the post is to be about.
Ah yes, perception. Specifically why you sometimes don't notice something or someone that you see everyday until one day that suddenly changes. For example I am driven to school each day. As I have mentioned in a previous blog post that I posted a long long time ago, I went to a mainstream high school for year 7, before changing school. Since year 10 my driver has picked up a girl who lives very close to the school I used to go to. After a bit over a year of going this way I saw someone standing on a traffic island who I was sure went to my old school. Sure enough (sure enough? That must be the first time anyone under 40 has used that phrase) she had left me a message on facebook (do you really leave messages on facebook? It just feels much more of a real world thing. I should stop abusing brackets, perhaps start using footnotes) asking whether or not she had seen me drive past a traffic island. It transpires (I could just be using an internet thesaurus to make myself sound smart and you'd never know. I'm actually going to do that for the rest of the sentence) that ourselves had twain been appearing in affecting xerox abode by breathtaking aforementioned age each one academy astronomical day as a age after realising. (Or, in English "that we had both been at the same place at the same time every school day for a year without realising". Remind me to never do that again) The interesting thing here is that we both noticed each other on the exact same day.
Another less interesting but shorter example is that I never noticed that we had curtains in our toilet room until they were shut.
So let's examine the reasons for suddenly noticing something. To do this I'm going to break it down and simplify the question (though it probably won't come out as simple). First lets make the assumption that an outcome will remain the same unless one of its contributors changes. The contributors here are the item, person, journey or other being observed and you the observer. In the case of the toilet curtains the item changed. Normally the curtains are always open so I can continue my day without noticing them as I have no need to interact with them and they are always the same, so fit with the image of the toilet room that I have subconsciously built so that I know where I am (incidentally this is the same image in your head that means if you opened the door and narnia was there you'd find it odd). One day the curtains are closed, the room no longer fits in with the image in my head so I notice it. This is one of the ways you can notice something you've never noticed before and to be honest is a tad dull.
So onto the more interesting way. If we go back to the contributors to the outcome we can see we've already covered the item changing. So we can now move onto the observer, you, changing. We are all changing all the time, even reading this post will irreversibly change who you are. As you change the way you perceive the world around you changes too. So when you change you notice new things, things that have been staring you in the face for years but you've never noticed.
Noticing new things can change you, again giving you new perception. This new perception will allow you to notice more things you've never noticed, which will change you, offering new perception on the world, etcetera, slowly changing the world you know, but not by replacing the things you are aware of, but by adding new things, expanding the way you see the world.
However, if you fall into a routine of doing the same thing every day, although you will continue to change it will be much slower than if you vary your life, doing things you haven't done before and seeing things you haven't seen before.
So take a different route occasionally, catch the wrong bus and most importantly, pay attention to the world around you.
Forgot to mention, props to Madeleine (aka traffic island girl) for helping me come up with this idea
Forgot to mention, props to Madeleine (aka traffic island girl) for helping me come up with this idea
6 comments:
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one thing, i don't understand how any part of "seeing this girl at the traffic island everday" thing changed, to cause you to notice eachother?
I'll be honest, I'm not too sure either. All the deep philosophical message aside, I think it might actually have been her hair changed to a somewhat more noticeable colour.
my hair had been white quite a while before that ;)
You did your hair on the 27th of July 2009, at which point the summer holiday would have already started. We saw one another on the 25th of September, just into the new school year, so it is perfectly possible that our timings wouldn't have been at exactly the same time until then.
Well, that made me seem like a stalker.
Correction: You had your hair done on approximately the 10th of June.
Not that I'm obsessive or anything.
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