Hannah Sorenson’s Reviews > The Art of Noticing: 131 Ways to Spark Creativity, Find Inspiration, and Discover Joy in the Everyday > Status Update

cont’d

If the room gave you any feeling you should know exactly what it was that gave you that feeling. Try that for practice.^

^Ernest Hemingway, in the course of offering his thoughts on just what it is that makes a good writer, complained that most people neither truly listen nor truly observe. To underscore the point, he threw down a gauntlet:

You should be able to go into a room and when you come out know everything that you saw there and not only that.

^That kind of deep attention that we pay as children is something that I cherish, that I think we all can cherish and reclaim, because attention is that doorway to gratitude, the doorway to wonder, the doorway to reciprocity. And it worries me greatly that today’s children can recognize 100 corporate logos and fewer than ten plants.
— Robin Wall Kimmerer^

Look slowly

^A study by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York concluded that its patrons spend a median seventeen seconds in front of any given painting.^

^Deep attention is good for the soul.^

^"A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention," economist Herb Simon warned in 1971.^