Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.

Familiarity is a kind of blindness. The street you walk every day stops arriving as anything at all; your mind files it under known and spends its attention elsewhere. What good writing does is interrupt that filing, holding an ordinary thing still long enough that you see it rather than recognise it. The beauty was never hidden in any difficult sense. It was simply covered by your own efficiency.

Choose one thing you pass without looking and give it a full minute this week, as if you had to describe it to someone who had never seen it. The practice transfers, and people are usually where it matters most.