Fighting Distraction With the Noticing Game

When you open your eyes and really observe your surroundings, you'll find there’s beauty in every step.

Studies indicate that actively noticing positive experiences can increase overall happiness. Flystock/Shutterstock

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work,” wrote the poet Mary Oliver. Journalist Rob Walker argued in his book, “The Art of Noticing,” that, “What we do with our attention … is at the heart of what makes us human.”

These are serious claims, not to be taken lightly. Walker backs up his claim by explaining,

“More than any other creature, humans can outmaneuver our own base instincts. That’s why it’s no coincidence that peak distraction has coincided, for instance, with a vogue for meditation and mindfulness.” According to Walker, we’re aware of our tendency toward distraction, and we have the power to fight against the tendency. “We know we’re distracted, and we yearn to see the world more clearly. We also know we can learn to direct our attention where we wish to.”

We have the ability to focus and refine our attention. We’re free to direct it how we will, and that important choice shapes how we see and interact with the world. What we choose to focus on (and ignore) steers our day—and ultimately our life—in a certain direction.

As Walker notes, paying attention requires increasing effort in our modern age of dinging phones, blaring TVs, and interminable to-do lists. Oftentimes, all of this distracts us from what’s right in front of us. Our minds are elsewhere. Preoccupied. Absent. Yet life plays out here, not somewhere else. We risk missing out on a richer experience of the world when we don’t notice the things close to us.

Fortunately, there are many ways to strengthen our ability to pay attention and notice things—Walker lists 131 in his book. Here, I will touch on just two, plucked from my own experience: “the noticing game” and the power of art.

What Do You Notice?

Noticing things leads to greater joy. For one thing, it’s fun. My wife, young daughter, and I play a game called, “What do you notice?” The game invites us to open our eyes to details, the obscure, and the forgotten things. We find words to describe those things. My wife and I want our little girl to be open, receptive, and attentive to reality, its intricacy, mystery, and splendor. The world doesn’t lack wonderful things. It only lacks people who wonder at them.

Asking and answering the simple question “What do you notice?” focuses the mind. Last time we played while taking a walk on our country road, I really studied what fell under my eye, instead of just half-seeing it. I noticed the sun-burnished swamp grass across from my house protruding from snow, islands of color in a sea of white, and saw the way it stirred sleepily in the wind. I saw the sun striking a far-off hillside unevenly, glazing some branches in gold and leaving others in a shadowy gray, and I observed a bluebird—an early pledge of spring that I wouldn’t have noticed if I wasn’t looking for every treasure hidden in the landscape

If you play “the noticing game” while on your normal commute or while walking a familiar stretch of road, you can challenge yourself to notice new things each time. You'll be amazed to discover how much you’ve glossed over in the past, how many interesting, weird, comical, beautiful, and unexpected features of that well-known area have evaded you.

Gratitude for Every Detail

Familiar surroundings tend to recede from our view. We become numb to them in a state scientists call “inattentional blindness.” We no longer pay attention because we think we know them so well, and, as a result, we appreciate them less. In his novel “The Alchemist,” Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho put it this way: “When every day seems the same, it is because we have stopped noticing the good things that appear in our lives.”

Here lies one of the greatest benefits of noticing: gratitude and appreciation. Noticing is fun, yes. But more importantly, noticing refreshes our vision of life and the good things in it. Gratitude flows naturally from that realization. We can’t enjoy or be thankful for the things we don’t see. Nor can we be curious about them, a key step in the process of creativity and inspiration, as Walker points out.

In “Politics,” Aristotle laid out an educational program that included just four subjects: reading and writing, gymnastic exercise, music, and, somewhat surprisingly, drawing. The reasoning for this, it seems to me, is because of drawing’s close connection to noticing. Drawing requires careful observation of the world. An artist can’t reproduce on paper what he hasn’t paid special attention to. Artists must learn to draw what they see, not merely what they think they see. They must be receptive to the world as it is, down to the last crevice, curve, shadow, and scale. Drawing trains the mind and eye to take in the world in the fullest way possible.

The great artists—whether painters, poets, or potters—notice things the rest of us don’t. We could almost say the artist’s vocation is to notice things and to help others notice them, too. As poet Naomi Shihab Nye said, “Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.”

We must learn to see. We must practice opening up our minds like a receptive flower to the warmth of the sun. This wealth inside our minds and imaginations ferments and percolates, maybe for years. Eventually this soil of experience and observation sends out new shoots of creativity, inspiration, wisdom, and wonder.

Noticing things flows from and produces amazement and delight. I conclude, as I began, with Mary Oliver, who, with her sharp eye and golden tongue, had the best words to describe this. She wrote, “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”