With New Eyes

On seeking wonder in the familiar

The first winter I spent in Seattle was rough. I moved here knowing only a handful of people—several of whom were newlyweds that first winter, others had new babies at home. So, I didn’t have people to get out and about with. I also didn’t realize that most of Seattle stops going out and about in the winter. This is a city that hibernates, it was like nothing I had seen before.

Normally, when you move to a new city, you have threads to stitch you into place—a job through which you meet people, or children in school who lead to community, or perhaps you are in school yourself, or attend religious services or participate in sports of some sort. You have ties to the outer world—and a reason to leave the house on a regular basis.

I had none of this. I was here trying to write my first book—for which I had been given a rather large contract, something that alternately felt like a gift and a the worst sort of curse. Every day I woke up and tried to write this thing I did not know how to write, and every day I failed, and ended up looking helplessly out the window as the rain fell. Every day.

Prior to that point, I hadn’t believed Seasonal Affective Disorder was a real thing, but between the lack of sunshine, lack of community, the black hole-ness of my career, and the constant bleak weather, I was in it deep. I remember telling myself each morning: “Just get up and MAKE the bed, then you will have accomplished at least one thing today.” The urge to pull the covers over my head and stay there all day was strong indeed.

But over the course of that winter, I developed a coping strategy, something I called Seeking Wonder.* It had to do with my camera.

This was prior to good quality cameras being installed in all our phones, but my work in food writing and blogging had lead to an interest in photography. Seeking Wonder consisted of taking a photo walk each morning when I woke up. It was about getting out the door and looking for something beautiful.

I looked for beauty, and I always found it.

I remember so clearly the photos I took that winter—of the moss that had clustered on street numbers of a house down the road from me; the striped purple crocuses that appeared one morning on a neighbor’s lawn and felt like a miracle; the delicate unfurling of a tender green fern that I stopped and squatted down to look at. It all felt miraculous.

This is what photography asks of us: to stop and pay attention for a moment, to see the wonder.

It reminds me of the Mary Oliver poem, Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.

What can I tell you about this practice? It took no more than ten or fifteen minutes a day, but it got me through that terrible winter of depression. And when spring came, I reveled in it all—the delicate pink plum blossoms, the scent of hyacinths so sweet they felt intoxicating, all the birds that returned to steal bits of moss to build their nests.

I still lean on this philosophy of Seeking Wonder, though these days it is much easier with a camera phone in my pocket. It’s so easy I often forget about it. But every winter, I take more photographs on my walks, I stop more often. This practice of slowing down and looking for the small, wondrous things—the nub of a tree bud about to break; the pattern of a leaf visible only when the sun shines through it; the seedpod that, freed of its petals, has a beauty of its own. It all helps me get through the dark days until spring. The discipline of that winter gave way to riotous pleasure come spring.

I’m not the first person to talk about how a photo walk can shift your mood or perspective. And it doesn’t have to be looking for what you find beautiful, either. You can have a scavenger hunt sort of photo walk—looking for things that are purple, for example, or things that are fluffy, or things with numbers (This can be a fun thing to do with kids). There are all sorts of ways to see the ordinary in new light.

In the beginning of summer, on a rainy day that felt glum, I challenged myself to see the one-block loop I walk with the dog in a new way. I cannot tell you how many hundreds of times I have walked this loop in the past four years—it is the route I take when the dog has been complaining to go out but I really don’t have the time; I am sure I could navigate it in my sleep.

This time I went with my camera phone out, to see what I could find, and I was rewarded with such beauty—all these things I rush by so quickly on a normal day. The camera gave me an excuse to slow down, to look deeper, to see the wonder. I couldn’t believe what I came home with. The rain I had been grumpy about made things even more entrancing (and the dog was happy for the extra time to sniff).

It reminds me a bit of the line from Marcel Proust: "The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes." It reminds me that our lives all have more loveliness than we generally notice on a given day.

One of the things that makes travel so interesting is that we’re seeing new things—but how about trying to see the familiar things in new ways? How about taking the phone that most of us have attached to our hand or hip and use it as a new way of seeing, a new way of appreciating. Let me know if you give it a try, I’d love to hear how it goes for you.

There is far more loveliness than we generally notice on a given day. I know that for sure.

*TW: longtime readers may note that I used to call this practice “Stalking Wonder.” I liked the image of tiptoing up on wonder, of taking it unawares. But a dear friend recently shared with me that she never could stomach the name, because for her it triggered old trauma she had experienced. And so, voila, a new name.
Because there is nothing more imporant than making everyone comfortable and welcomed. Nothing.