Discipline of noticing
The reading this week by John Mason was about the different forms of noticing and different ways we can learn from what we notice in every day life. A quote that stoof out to me was “noticing itself is something that happens to us, not something we do deliberately”which I believe is entirely correct. With this quote in mind, I decided to try one of the tasks he set: “arrange to have with you two colours of pen, and to chose which colour to use each time you reach for a pen”. When participating in this task I did notice myself overthinking it a lot of the time. I had a green and purple pen set up over the duration of a day, during which I wrote my cousin’s birthday card, wrote a shopping list and wrote in my diary. Every time I went to pick up a pen, I took the time to decide which colour to use. In the end I used both alternatively however it was a much more time consuming process and required lots of thinking which I wouldn’t have done if I stuck with the norm and just grabbed out a black pen.
Mason states that the most important and key element in each task is ‘set yourself’. He then proposes the question of how we actually set ourselves to do something. I believe that setting yourself to do something is such an annoying, tedious and draining effort, rather than just letting something happen naturally. For example, setting myself to go for an afternoon run is such an effort. I have to plan what time I’m going to go, find appropriate running gear to wear, get dressed, get iPod ready to listen to music, think about which route to take …. It’s just too much!!! Whereas if I just happened to have my active wear and runners on, I would just quickly go out for a run without setting myself to do it and thinking about the whole process too much. It I set myself the task of going for a run in the end I just don’t do it. I actually enjoy running, that’s not the issue – it’s the effort it takes when I set myself the task of doing it.
The reading this week was extremely interesting as I felt as though it related to me so much in every day life.