Another one of our readings for this week is an extract from Researching your own practice: The discipline of noticing by John Mason which focused mainly on the art of noticing. In some sense, it suggests that noticing is something that just happens to us, and not something we necessarily deliberately do.

It included an example of how a person was walking into an office, and someone asked them if they noticed a particular sign outside, and that person recalled their walk and realised that they did notice the sign outside but they wouldn’t have initially noticed it had it not been brought up.  This shows the idea of ordinary noticing versus marking. Ordinary noticing is as the name suggests — it’s basically just regular noticing and we won’t necessarily choose to notice something. Whereas marking is noticing something that we’ll recall later in discussion.

This reminded of the times that people have asked me the question, ‘did you notice that?’ or something in similar, and saying that I did notice whatever it is they asked about when I recalled it back. I found it really interesting how the reading gave me a new perspective on noticing things. I guess now I realised that just because I choose to not notice something, it doesn’t mean that I’m not really noticing it in the first place. And that when I choose to focus on something in particular, my focus on that object or feeling or whatever it is I want to notice, will be there along with everything else that I am unconsciously noticing.

As an ending note, I feel like I’ve said notice too many times in different variations that I think that this is enough noticing for one night.