On Looking

In "Amateur Eyes" by Alexandra Horowitz, she talks about how the most common can become the most ignored and least observed. She concluded that the path she took daily with her dog was more unknown to her than to her dog. Who unlike her, looked at everything, even in the trash of neighbors. She did the exercise, in which she tried to observe everything in detail, as her dog did. With this exercise, she was able to observe common details in her neighborhood that had been there for years, but she had never noticed them. According to Horowitz, "we see, but we do not see: we use our eyes, but our gaze is glancing, frivolously considering its object. We see the signs, but not their meanings. We are not blinded, but we have blinders”. The daily routine, the eagerness, and the hustle weary makes us walk like using skates and makes us ignore the small details of the ordinary of life. The eagerness makes us forget "the events unfolding in your body, in the distance, and right in front of you” and “an unthinkably large amount of information that continues to bombard all of your senses". I have always said that the Hurricane category 5, María, was a wake up call, to get up from our daily routine. It allowed me to see how blessed I am, how ephemeral life is, but also to pay more attention and care to what surrounds us. The most that suffered for this phenomenon was nature. When we went out of the house, after the hurricane, I was astonished. When living in the countryside, many houses and places were covered or not visible by vegetation. I was amazed because all the trees, palms, and bushes some were naked and others very beaten and shrunken. I saw houses and places that in 19 years I had not seen and not only because they were covered by vegetation but because I had not stopped to observe everything on the road. I was very busy thinking about reaching my destination, I never stopped to observe everything that was hidden behind the large trees and vegetation. According to Alexandra Horowitz, "our ignorance / concentration enables us to just notice the scrawls on the page”. The eagerness makes us “miss the possibility of being surprised by what is hidden in plain sight right in front of us”. We need to stop and not allow the eagerness, the daily routine and the hustle weary make us to not pay attention to what really deserves it.