Learning to Notice Things Again
I’ve been thinking lately that I need to learn how to notice things again. Except I’m not sure that’s actually true.
I notice nature all the time. An interesting plant growing on the side of the road. The light changing towards the end of summer. A bird I haven’t seen before, or a strange mushroom that popped up overnight after rain. A tree that’s just really, impressively good at being a tree.
The problem is that most of those moments are fleeting.
Huh. I wonder what that is…
And then my brain is immediately dragged back into whatever else has been demanding its attention.
Work, money, my phone, other people. Whatever’s supposed to happen tomorrow, whatever already went wrong yesterday, what the hell I’m doing with the next six months of my life.
Nature gets five seconds. Everything else gets the rest of me.
I didn’t realize how much that was affecting me until I went on vacation.
I Think I Needed Some Space
I’ve been working in a pretty toxic environment, and it’s been taking up far more of my life than the hours I physically spend there. You can leave work without work leaving you.
There’s the conversation you replay on the drive home. Or the thing you already know you’ll have to deal with tomorrow. Or just the low-grade frustration that follows you into your day off, when you’d much rather be thinking about literally anything else.
Add normal life on top of that, plus some bigger changes I’ve been trying to figure out, and apparently my brain decided every available square inch of mental real estate was spoken for.
Then I went away. Nothing was fixed. I hadn’t suddenly figured out my life, and the things waiting for me at home were still going to be there when I got back.
For a little while, though, I didn’t have to deal with them. And that created actual space…the kind where I could notice something interesting and, instead of immediately moving on, stay there.
There’s a Difference Between Noticing and Actually Looking
That was probably the biggest thing I realized on the trip. I hadn’t stopped noticing nature. I’d stopped having enough space to stay with what I noticed. There’s a difference.
You can drive past a field and think, that’s beautiful. That’s noticing. But what happens if you actually stop?
What flowers are growing there? What’s visiting them? What’s moving around in the grass underneath? Give something more than a few seconds of your attention, and it starts to unfold.
I found the same thing crouched next to a tidal pool. From standing height, it was just a puddle of seawater sitting in some rocks.
But get down next to it, and there was a whole tiny world going about its business — a hermit crab dragging its shell across the bottom, snails inching along like they had somewhere to be, something small and stubborn clamped onto a rock that had clearly decided this was home now.
That’s when a beach stops being just a beach. A forest stops being a wall of green. The roadside stops being a collection of weeds and becomes individual things, everywhere, each doing its own strange little thing whether we’re paying attention or not.
On vacation, I finally had time to pay attention. I could look at a plant simply because I wanted to look at it. I could walk somewhere without caring how many steps I was getting. I could sit near the water without feeling like I needed to be doing something productive at the same time.
There didn’t have to be a point. That part felt surprisingly important.
I Wasn’t Trying to Be Mindful
We’re very good at turning things into assignments.
Go outside because it’s good for your mental health. Walk because you need exercise. Garden because you can grow your own food. Forage because you can bring something home. Meditate because you’re stressed. Hike because there’s a summit you’re supposed to reach.
And, of course, if something is particularly beautiful, take a picture of it immediately so you can look at the picture later instead of the thing currently sitting in front of you.
I'm guilty of all of it. There was a porcupine calmly working through a patch of leaves during the trip, and I just watched for a while…the photo was almost an afterthought. Some of my favorite moments on this trip didn't accomplish anything.
I wasn’t deliberately practicing mindfulness or performing some nature-based mental health exercise. I was just there. That was the entire activity.
And without really trying, I started becoming curious again. What’s that plant? Why is that growing here? What kind of bird is making that sound? Sometimes I’d look something up, sometimes I wouldn’t — the answer wasn’t really the important part.
I had enough room in my head to wonder.
Then I Started Noticing Something Else
I felt peaceful. Not all the time…the contrast became pretty obvious whenever I went somewhere crowded. Around a lot of people, my attention immediately starts dividing itself.
There are conversations happening around me, people moving in every direction, someone looking at me, someone standing too close, someone irritated, someone loud, someone who’s apparently decided that whatever I’m doing is now very interesting to them.
I’ve always been sensitive to the energy of the people around me.
Call that empathy, social awareness, overstimulation, or whatever terminology makes sense to you…I notice people, a lot, and people are complicated.
We’re constantly perceiving one another while simultaneously being perceived. Even when nobody says anything, there’s information flying around everywhere.
Nature doesn’t really do that to me. A tree doesn’t care what I’m wearing. The ocean doesn’t want to know what I do for work. A wildflower isn’t trying to figure out why I’m traveling.
The chickadee might have some opinions about my presence, but fortunately it keeps them to itself.
Well, other than a slight admonishing chirp or two.
When I was somewhere quiet and surrounded mostly by the natural world, that entire layer of processing seemed to disappear. I could just exist. And apparently, I really needed that.
Maybe Peace Isn’t Something You Have to Earn
I’ve caught myself thinking plenty of times that I’ll finally relax when I leave this job, or when I figure out where I’m going, or get through this mess, or life just settles down already.
And to be clear, sometimes the situation really does need to change. Spending time outside isn’t going to magically fix a toxic workplace. Looking at moss is not a comprehensive career strategy.
Unfortunately.
But the trip reminded me I don’t have to wait until every problem in my life has been neatly resolved before I’m allowed to experience peace.
There were moments when nothing had changed about my actual circumstances, but I wasn’t thinking about them. I was looking at the ocean, or studying some plant, or wandering around wondering what was growing beside me.
For a little while, my attention wasn’t being fought over.
I wasn’t escaping reality. If anything, I was unusually present in the reality directly in front of me. And somewhere in that immersion, my brain got quiet.
Have We Filled Every Empty Space?
That quiet got me wondering about something bigger. We have built an extraordinarily connected world.
We can talk to almost anyone instantly. We carry more information in our pockets than any previous generation could have imagined. We can work from almost anywhere, entertain ourselves anywhere, shop anywhere. Photograph everything. Track everything.
Get notified about all of it.
That’s progress, I guess, though I wonder if we’ve also become very good at eliminating empty space. There’s always something available to occupy our attention.
And maybe some of those spaces weren’t actually empty. Maybe that’s where we used to wonder, observe, daydream, or get bored enough to become interested in looking at something around us.
I don’t think the answer is smashing our phones with rocks and returning to the forest. I’m rather fond of indoor plumbing.
But I do wonder whether we’ve built lives that demand more of our attention than we realize, because when some of those demands disappeared for a few days, I didn’t feel deprived. I started seeing more.
I Want to Bring Some of That Home
Obviously, vacation ended. I can’t spend the rest of my life wandering around quiet stretches of coastline examining plants and avoiding civilization.
Tempting.
But I don’t think I need to. What I want to hold onto is the difference between noticing something and giving myself permission to stay with it.
If something catches my attention, maybe I don’t need to immediately move on…maybe I can give it five minutes instead of five seconds. I can look closer, wonder about it, learn its name. Or I can have absolutely no idea what I’m looking at and simply enjoy it anyway.
I don’t want to turn this into another thing I’m supposed to accomplish. That’s sort of the point.
Maybe This Is What TriGardening Is About
I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I want TriGardening to be. Gardening is still part of it. So is herbalism, foraging, wild plants, houseplants, growing food, learning what’s happening outside as the seasons change.
I want to know why plants do the things they do. I want to learn which plants people have traditionally used and what modern research actually says about them, what’s edible, what’s useful, what’s dangerous, and what’s simply weird.
I want to follow botanical rabbit holes because something growing beside the road made me wonder, what the hell is that?
But I think there’s something underneath all of those things: attention. The more I learn about the natural world, the more reasons I have to look closely at it. And the closer I look, the bigger it becomes.
Maybe TriGardening doesn’t need to be about extracting some profound life lesson from every plant we encounter. Sometimes the plant can just be a plant. Sometimes we can simply be curious.
And sometimes, if we’re lucky, being curious about something outside ourselves gives everything inside us a chance to quiet down for a while.
So here’s my experiment. The next time something in nature catches my attention, I’m going to try not to immediately move on.
No requirement to identify it. No picture necessary. No lesson to learn. No productivity.
Just stay for a minute. Look. See what else is there.
Maybe I never needed to learn how to notice things again.
Maybe I needed to learn how to stay with the things I noticed.
And somewhere in those quiet moments on vacation, with nowhere else my attention needed to be, I remembered what that felt like.
I found peace there. I’d like to keep looking for it.
Until next time, stay curious and keep growing.
-KC 🌱
It would be quite interesting to know more about plants and their benefits.