In James Wood’s wonderful book Serious Noticing, he points his readers to an essay by John Berger on drawing where Berger offers this fascinating phrase, “the structure of experiences.”
Berger writes, “To draw is to look, examining the structure of experiences. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree being looked at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree being looked at) not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second.”
As you go through your day, do you “see” or “look?” They are two very different ways of engaging with the world.
To see is to notice your environment as you navigate from one place or situation to another. You see a traffic light. You see a door. You see food in a refrigerator.
But you can choose instead to look at a tree for two minutes. You can look at a loved one for three minutes. You can look at an avocado for four minutes before you cut it open.
When you choose to look, as Berger puts it, we can begin to examine the structure of the experience unfolding in front of us, and by so doing, be present within that experience.
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