Maria Popova at The Marginalian:
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” William Blake wrote in his most spirited letter. “As a man is, so he sees.”
Because how we look at the world shapes the world we see, every act of noticing is an act of worlding. The Latin root of notice is to begin knowing, to have an instrument of recognition, and yet human consciousness is a prediction machine that recognizes only what it already knows, sees what it expects to see, lensed through its anticipations and past experience. “Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you,” cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz wrote about the science of looking. “To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote a century earlier about the art of seeing.
It does not come easily to us, true noticing — that transmutation of looking into seeing. We must apprentice ourselves to it daily. It is our life’s work.
more here.
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