“This looking and not seeing things was a great sin, I thought, and one that was easy to fall into. It was always the beginning of something bad and I thought that we did not deserve to live in the world if we did not see it.” Ernest Hemingway
Hemingway calls it ‘seeing’. I like that. Modern self help blogs, books and gurus refer to mindfulness, being present and in the moment. No matter what you call it, the idea is that we notice and truly take in what is happening around us.
If you want to be more creative, if you want to make art, the one piece of advice you will receive more than any other is, learn how to see. The act of making requires you to take something in the world and changing it. This is how we show others how we see the world. And for those who claim not to be artists, but business people consider this; any product or service, at its essence, is nothing more than someone’s vision of a solution to a problem they see in the world.
We spend hours of our days distracted, being entertained, avoiding boredom and discomfort. We avoid the world, and by doing so we don’t see everything that’s around us. When we distract ourselves with games, phones, social media, we see an abstraction of reality. We are spending our time seeing how others see the world, or worse, how others want us to believe that they see the world.
And when we distract ourselves, we end up forgetting how to look. We don’t see the world. And the sin in not seeing the world is that we stop thinking for ourselves.
In not taking the time to see we don’t create the opportunity to interpret and to understand. And when we don’t interpret and assimilate the world around us, we stop learning for ourselves. We end up growing lazy in our thinking. We adopt others’ opinions because interpreting and questioning has become effortful. And so, most of us now inherit our views instead of formulating them and, with time, we’ll become blind to who we are and deaf to what we think.