Due to the ice, we often had to look down at the ground to make sure we weren't stepping on ice and to find the best way around the icy parts. This did not prevent us from talking, though. Natter, natter, natter.
At one point, I noticed a large brown and beige bird that landed on the ground and when I looked in its direction, it moved and flew up to a nearby tree. All of us stopped and looked up; the movement had attracted people's attention. All except for the two people who were walking with the group for the first time ever. They had decided to walk more in preparation for a holiday in a year's time. They stood on the path and kept on talking to each other. They must have noticed that we weren't walking any more and yet they were not curious enough to see what it was that had caused us to stop. They didn't look up at all. They didn't hear people say, "It's a buzzard." I kept thinking, "How can they not be curious? How can they not look up?"
This, however, is nothing new to me. I remember one walk that I led with a larger group. At one point, I asked some women, "Did you see the deer?"
"Deer?" they replied in amazement. "What deer?"
"The large herd of deer you just passed in that large field," I replied.
Nope. They'd not noticed a thing, so busy were they with their chat. Yes, you have to watch where you put your feet, but you could always look up from time to time to check where you are and what there is about you.
It seems a lot of people go through life like this - seeing, but not actually noticing anything. I remember watching some corny four-part series called Mistral's Daughter, with Stacy Keach in the starring role. He played an artist and at one point, he put an apple on a table and asked his little daughter to tell him what colour it was. "Green," she replied.
"Look again," he ordered. And she did. Then she noticed the green apple had flecks of yellow, rust, orange and red and the stalk was dark brown and black,
It's like looking out of the train and saying, "Oh, there's some green countryside" and not noticing the colourful houses, the yellow bales of hay, the red berries, the grey tree trunks, the red tractor, the blueness of the sky reflected in the pond and so on and so forth.
One summer, when I was waking up early because of the light, I went on walks through the town for an hour before breakfast and I took my camera with me. I uploaded lots of photos onto Facebook and some people were amazed that I had taken photos of things they'd never noticed before.
Just because you have eyes and are not blind, you can be said to 'see'. That does not, however, actually mean that you notice much. There are so many interesting and beautiful things that surround us, but most people never see them.
This reminds me a bit of something that the great Irish wit that was Oscar Wilde once said: We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Raise your eyes from the pavement and look around you and notice things. It makes life more interesting and uplifting.
No comments:
Post a Comment