Life is busy. We make it that way. Always there’s something to do – go to work, buy groceries, do laundry, clean, go out, meet people, watch that show on TV, finish that work project – and everything is hurry, hurry, hurry! I can sleep when I’m dead! I don’t need sleep when I have Internet! I don’t have time to slow down! Well, you may be right. Maybe you have a lot to do; maybe you have unavoidable responsibilities like we all do. Maybe it’s necessary to be stressed and overwhelmed and caught up in the whirlwind of life.
But maybe not.
Even if life is busy, I think it’s important to take time to notice the little things. I don’t necessarily mean looking at things with an agenda, or making a to-do list that includes “notice little things”; I mean taking the time to appreciate all the tiny beauties that surround us every day.
When I was little I used to lay on my stomach in the grass and just look at everything – the way the wind played with the blades of grass, the intense colors of things both living and inanimate, how curves met straight lines and blended into the beautiful huge wide-open world. Kids look at things, touch things – they rub their hands across a tree’s bark, and jump in the mud, pick up things and throw them; if you’ve ever watched a toddler you know that they’ll put absolutely anything into their mouths. Children experience things in a deeply personal way that we lose as adults. Some of that is because when we become familiar with something, we forget how to really look at it – we take for granted what it will be like. It takes effort to pay attention and appreciate how life really is, rather than how we expect it to be.
Something that I personally notice is the sky. I am endlessly fascinated by the ever-changing vista of light, clouds, and colors that interplay across the vast dome above us. You can never predict how the randomness will combine into patterns that are surprising or beautiful or humorous. Here’s a cloud formation I saw just last week.
Vast and majestic and gone after a few moments.
Tiny details like that pass away so quickly that you need to seize the chance to appreciate them. Other tiny things that make me happy: the smoothness of the lip of my tea mug when I’m taking a drink; the reflection of trees in water; a particularly complicated rhythm in a song I know by heart; smelling coffee in the air as I pass a coffeeshop; the taste of a mint dissolving on my tongue.
I appreciate some photographers for their ability to notice the beauty in the details of life and capture it in the one perfect frozen second, preserving it for all of us to appreciate. However, photography can only capture the visual world; there are tiny beauties we can appreciate with all of our senses. In the course of a day, there are too many small beauties to count, but I think that we can teach ourselves to notice them. If you have the chance, if you decide to make the time, make a list of the tiny beauties you notice today. Try to capture one from every sense – sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing – and savor it in all its transience. If you do, it’s likely that – though the laundry is still waiting and the work is still undone and you still need to finish cooking dinner – you will find a small moment of joy and serenity.