Why Noticing Matters

Hello Good Lookers,

This is Menka from Just Looking with another Noticing: a nudge—in the form of a newsletter—to slow down and stay curious.

There are days I very actively avoid the news. Because although I live in London in relative safety and comfort, turning my attention towards the horrific violence elsewhere leaves me with such a sore heart and mind. But on other days, I choose to bear witness, accepting the ache and moving through the world differently as a result. I don't always get it right, but that's the whole point of this continual practice of noticing: learning how to be with the darkness and suffering as well as the light and beauty. The gymnastics of attention. Which is what I want to write about today.

Noticing is the first step to caring

I once tried an improv class to see if that would finally help calm my stage nerves. It didn't. But I did learn something amazing.

If an actor is trying to show the audience that they love someone, they can do this by spending a lot of time looking at that someone. Returning their gaze to their object of love, again and again, glancing, tracking, noticing details. To us sitting in the audience, this looks a lot like love. We see where the actor's attention is going, and we intuitively sense their care. Even a child would sense it. The simplicity of this really hit home. What we look at is what we care about!

Tell me what you pay attention to, and I will tell you who you are.

– José Ortega y Gasset (Spanish philosopher 1833 - 1948)

A great metaphor for noticing is "gymnastics of the attention." It comes from Simone Weil, who taught philosophy of science at the Lycée for Girls in Le Puy. She used the phrase to talk about teaching as the training of attention. And metaphors matter. This one emphasises the role of movement, practice and choice in what we attend to. Sure, we could fall (and stay up late doomscrolling), but we can also get back up and have another go. Over time, what we practice looking at is what we care about.

I began my career working on social challenges such as homelessness and climate change. Fifteen years in, I shifted my focus to the inner dimension of mindfulness, and many of my friends and colleagues were a little worried. They thought I'd been on one too many yoga retreats and given up on the hard stuff! But to me, it was the opposite. It's when we stop noticing each other, and how connected we all are that we're more likely to feel lonely, alienated, polarised and even exploitative.

To borrow some excellent words from the writer Craig Mod:

If you don't notice, you can't give a shit.

So the question is: What is worth noticing? We have seemingly endless choices in our infinite scrolls and instant searches. But on closer examination, we find algorithms creating monocultures masquerading as choice. It might look like a feast, but it's mostly just corn syrup. Attentionally malnourished, we can easily start feeling disconnected from ourselves, each other and the natural world.

When people ask me why I created Just Looking, I ramble on for a few minutes, explaining all this. In my head, there is a thread of logic around slowness -> curiosity -> choice -> noticing -> connecting -> caring, but often, the words all fold into a gloopy mess of earnestness.

Over the summer, I started wondering if there was a better way of communicating this, so I collaborated with artist Freddie Clough to create an "explainer video" that I'm thinking of as a kind of manifesto. It moves quickly (we were attempting to keep it to just one minute!), but each scene has been crafted carefully using community photos and footage, a slow hand-rolled method called print scanning, and original music. Let me know what you think.

Experiment with your freedom of attention

From time to time, when you're paying attention to something, pause to ask yourself, "Was this a choice I made?" Get curious about how much of what you see is directed by habit or external influences versus your own personal practice, your own gymnastics of attention.

Community updates

• We are super close to having all the elements ready to launch the cards we've been working on for nearly one year: 60 Experiments in Looking! As we've been playtesting, many people have told me that our Just Looking cards are similar in form and creative spirit to Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies. I'm so surprised I'd never heard of them before, but going to take this as a compliment! Have any of you got these?

• Sam Furness of Creative Quest launched a Kickstarter yesterday for a brilliant collaborative book and kit all about Magic. There's no way you could get this and not start seeing magic in everyday life! I've already backed it for my copy.

• It was such a joy to attend the recent launch of The Orbit, created by Ana Grigorovici. It is a new directory for female founders to support each other. Come and join us; there's even a collaborative Spotify playlist!

• I received a beautiful photography book by Antonina Mamzenko, Beauty Hunting, in the post a few weeks ago. It was packaged in photo printing offcuts!

Five Links about Looking

Bye, Comet Tsuchinshan
The last few weeks have been epic for noticing that we are part of a cosmos. In addition to the Northern Lights being visible from people's kitchen windows, there's been this comet on its way out of our solar system.

Noticing and being noticed by the natural world
Dan Nixon, the author of the Perpetual Beginner substack, has gifted us another essay, giving us a "way back home". Featuring Rilke, Mary Oliver and that viral pet donkey that was lost and later found living his best life among a herd of elks!

Caring for people when they may never remember
Something I thought about a lot when my son was really young was that he would not remember any of it. This essay is about a child caring for a parent with dementia. As always, Courtney Martin's writing is so tender.

Embracing the familiar
Funny how we tend to find our own neighbourhoods a little boring. Photographer Nicholas J.R. White talks about rediscovering his place in South England Dartmoor. (via the flux of inspiration that is Andy Adams' FlakPhoto)

One week's trash
A provocative photography project about noticing what we throw away. Photographer Gregg Segal has made portraits of people in his neighbourhood in California with a week's worth of their own trash around them.

How are you all doing? What's inspiring your looking these days? I'd love to hear from you.

With curiosity,
Menka

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