There are things you see every day whose existence would sound impossible if you encountered them for the first time.

Repetition flattens almost everything. A tree turning sunlight into wood, a voice arriving through the air as recognizable meaning, a small animal with its own preferences living in your house: describe any of these to someone who had never met them and they would not be believable. The strangeness has not gone anywhere. Your attention has simply stopped stopping for it.

Try describing one everyday thing this week as though to someone who had never encountered it. Say what it does, plainly, without shorthand. The exercise takes two minutes and reliably restores the oddness of something you had walked past for years.