On the Practice of Noticing

01 Feb 2026·2 min read

There is a kind of attention that doesn’t grasp at things but lets them arrive. I’ve been trying to cultivate it for the better part of a year, with mixed results.

Most of what I know about this comes not from philosophy but from watching my daughter learn to walk. She would stop mid-step, transfixed by a dust mote in a shaft of light, a shadow on the floor. There was no hierarchy to what deserved attention. Everything was equally astonishing.

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noticing ≠ observing

Somewhere in growing up we acquire a filter. We learn to scan for relevance, to move efficiently through space, to tune out what we’ve already categorised. This is obviously necessary. But the filter has a cost.

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the beginner’s eye — Shunryu Suzuki

I think the cost is a kind of low-grade numbness. A sense that the world has already been fully accounted for, that there is nothing left to discover in the ordinary.¹

The practice itself is mundane. Walking without headphones. Eating without a screen. What surprised me was how difficult they are — not because I lack discipline, but because the filter runs so deep.

What I notice, when I manage to notice, is mostly small things. The way light enters a room at a particular angle. The sound of a building — its hum, its creaks, the specific quality of its silence.

The word “ordinary” comes from the Latin ordinarius — conforming to an established order. To find the ordinary astonishing is, in a sense, to refuse the established order of what counts as remarkable. ↑