Noticing is a Quiet Superpower

As part of a lyric essay writing workshop I am immersed in, Jeannine Ouellette’s amazing Essay in 12 Steps , we begin with a hunt for “shimmers and shards,” the building blocks of these essays. If you look up “lyric essay,” you find a lacy description about poetic techniques, fragments, white space, rhythm, and blending facts and feelings. I have never written like this, so I can’t say more, but this hunt is turning out to be harder than I thought. It means paying close attention to my physical surroundings. What’s hard about that? As I collect these observations (the beautiful ones called shimmers and the broken, scarred, or downright ugly ones are shards), I recognize my partial awareness in the world. Though I am asked to see what beckons me as a writer, I first must see what beckons me as a person.

And paying attention means not just to what I see, but recruiting other senses that have grown indolent through underuse. Somewhere I lost my innate wisdom to explore the world by listening, smelling, touching, and tasting it. The filters we learn as young children become so restrictive as we grow up that we forget how to be fully curious about a thing.

Once I relax into observing in a more inclusive way*, noticing means I strip away any interpretation or projected connection I might have between me and what is there. As a writer, this is challenging. I want to relate to my readers. To do that, I need to draw you in by offering rich experiences so you might examine your own lives and say, “Yes, I feel what Alice is talking about.”

Jumping ahead, I’m guessing I cannot offer rich, relatable experiences without knowing exquisitely what I am relating.

Now that I’ve been officially noticing for two weeks, there are a few things I can say on the topic. Noticers have an advantage in the world. I don’t mean they’re smarter or better or richer in the dollars and cents sense. They are richer in connections to their surroundings, other people, and importantly, to themselves. Like the “Spidey-sense” superpower that is part of our vernacular (note the word “sense”).

The low-hanging fruit is the environment. If we notice the lighting, temperature, breeze, or the axe standing in the corner next to the fireplace with a bloody handprint, we at least know where we are.

In conversations, do we ever pay attention to the micro-shifts that happen? When the tone changes. The silences. Who talks a lot and who stops talking. By listening with our eyes and ears and talking less, we learn.

We are taught to recognize patterns pre-verbally, but do we up our game as we grow up? Do we look for a repetition of anything? Commonalities on the streets of our city block? Repeating patterns on Nature’s flower petals? The arrangement of chords in a piece of music? Where is there randomness? Where are the mismatches? What is out of step between words and behavior?

Some of the most exciting parts of stories occur moments before conflict or a character’s insight. These edges are interesting in real life, too. How useful it could be to a superhero knowing a conflict is coming before it fully erupts.

How many of us rush through life disconnected at the neck? We intercept the life-sustaining signals our bodies send us about hunger, thirst, and fatigue. How can we expect to sense and register changes in edginess, ennui, or electricity unless we deliberately pay attention? Something to think about.

At first, I would forget to notice, then when I remembered, I would go on a “noticing binge.” That is not the point here. The point is to make noticing a seamless part of our lives. If we treat it like a skill we want to develop, and not something we do when we’re in the mood, we can sharpen it. I realized I have to start small. On the hour, I stop to see what has changed in my environment (mood, energy, conversation). I started keeping a list naming my observations without explaining them (snoring dog, salty breeze, dew-slimed floor). This week, I’m working on trying out different senses. One hour I’ll focus on sounds, another on movement.

Our bodies contain dashboards for noticing, and instead of paying attention first to all the seeming crises we have every day, we can note the physical sensation in our bodies (hunched shoulders, shallow breath, distracted brain). If we listen, we are armed with information before we don our capes.

With practice, noticing lets us adjust to a rapidly changing world earlier and easier. We can choose with more clarity because we have seen and considered our options in detail. Less energy is wasted in sorting through and figuring out patterns at the same time we are making decisions. We come to our lives more prepared and enriched. Sharper. It is harnessing acute awareness as leverage to better understand what is happening around us.

The point of the lyric essay workshop is to teach us to write sharper. For a writer, there is no greater superpower.

Love, Alice

* Besides the standard five external senses, there are many more internal senses. Key ones are proprioception (knowing where our bodies are in space), equilibrioception (sense of balance), nociception (ability to feel pain), thermoception (sense of temperature), chronoception (sense of the passage of time), and interoception (internal sensors that give us information about the physiological condition of the body, e.g. hunger, thirst).