You’ve walked to school a thousand times and couldn’t name one tree on the way. Wake the eyes up.

Repetition turns a route into a blank. Your mind stops taking in what it has already filed, which is efficient, and it means you can travel a familiar path for years and arrive with nothing to show for the time. The world did not get less interesting. Your looking went on standby.

On a walk you have done a hundred times, pick one category and hunt it: doors, birds, the colour of roofs. It sounds like a child’s game and it works, because attention needs a target. Two or three days of that and the route stops being empty space between places.