Unlearning: What do we need to unlearn to understand what possibilities already exist?
Good day, everyone.
Today’s question is a big one— one whose answers will likely best be revealed by asking ourselves this almost daily (or even several times a day)— especially when we find ourselves feeling like there are no possibilities or we really don’t understand why someone would do what they are doing.
What do we need to unlearn to understand what possibilities already exist?
This week’s word to know and grow will be an example of this, which is likely to get us noticing just how many more possibilities exist when our goal is to understand and notice. We’ll have the chance to be curious about how many more possibilities each of us have everyday that have gone unnoticed for a variety of reasons.
Goals of understanding and noticing sound achievable, simple even. And they are both simple and achievable— and also challenging.
What shall we do about that?
This week we’re invited to amp up our noticing to increase our understanding. This may be done through a variety of senses.
Vision (Seeing): When considering vision, you may have heard of the terms visual scanning, background and foreground. Visual scanning is what allows us to look over (scan) an area and focus on a particular thing, such as finding a person in a crowd of people. Our eyes allow us to take in all that visual information and then focus or zoom in on just that one subject. When we focus on that one thing, you might say the person moves from what may have been in our background vision as a sea of people and becomes foreground (our eye can zoom in enough to see someone despite all the other people and visual information surrounding them).
Hearing (auditory): We do the same process mentioned above with our hearing as well. Want to try that on?
Stop what you’re doing right now and listen. Listen to identify 5 sounds around you or take a minute and notice what sounds you hear around you, whichever comes first— how many things do we hear but are filtering out at any moment? For example, I can hear the whirl of a fan, a dog panting, crows calling, sandhill crane calls (they sound like prehistoric dinosaur calls to me), and water being poured in a coffee pot.
Other senses— there are several other senses that you may use, particularly if vision or hearing are not your primary senses used. We invite you to use the senses that work best for you— there are so many other ways of experiencing and noticing our environments. We’ll talk in more detail about additional senses in another post— for now, know additional senses could include: taste (gustatory), smell (olfactory), touch (tactile), proprioceptive (how our body senses itself in space) or vestibular (balance sense) systems, or interoception (how our body makes sense of itself inside). [1]
The invitation: Over the next week, you are invited to notice things you may not have seen before. Use whichever senses work best for you and simply notice what moves from background to foreground as a way of considering possibilities that may be going unnoticed.
It can be as simple as pausing to notice what is around us daily or it could be more specific— things like: walk or ride through a neighborhood or area of a community to identify things you hadn’t noticed before— search for 5-10 things (I would do this when my children were young and napping in a vehicle or stroller— if they fell asleep, I would drive or walk a bit longer to notice what businesses or areas I drove or walked by everyday and hadn’t even noticed existed. It always amazed me just how many places surrounded me I knew little or nothing about yet).
Tomorrow we’ll learn more about how this practice was transformational for me and how it might just make life a little more delightful for you as well. If you’re curious what my story is about tomorrow, your clue is below.
