Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh. I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.

Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.

Craig Mod • Looking Closely Is Everything

Saved by Keely Adler and

RelatedCollections

Long Distance Thinking

Simon Sarris map.simonsarris.com

At the origin of all good non-fiction writing is someone who thought: I want to know more about that. I want to understand how it works. I want to know where it came from and who was responsible for it. I want to understand its implications. It is a child gazing at the stars.

— How to write

“to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted.

L. M. Sacasas • If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention

Only untrained minds are boring. Or: Nothing in the world is bereft of delight. Looking closely helps unlock this delight, this wonder, this doofy curiosity.

Craig Mod • Looking Closely Is Everything

looking closely at dang near anything in this world of ours might very well be the key to it all.

Craig Mod • Looking Closely Is Everything

The lesson is clear: Treat curiosity and wonder as a guide to the future. That sense of wonder may just mean that those crazy enthusiasts are seeing something that you don’t … yet.

Tim O'Reilly • Wtf?

ACTIVE CURIOSITY. You want to have an explorer’s heart. The novelist Zadie Smith once wrote that when she was a girl, she was constantly imagining what it would be like to grow up in the homes of her friends. “I rarely entered a friend’s home without wondering what it might be like to never leave,” she wrote. “That is, what it would be like to be P

David Brooks • How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

This act of “really looking” is deceptive. It requires an almost “unlooking” to see closely, a kind of defocusing. Because: We tend to see in groups, not details. We scan an image or scene for the gist, but miss a richness of particulars. I suspect this has only gotten worse in recent years as our Daily Processed Information density has increased, ... See more