Watch a puppy meet snow for the first time. That’s what paying attention looks like.

Full attention is what a creature looks like when it has no idea what it is looking at. A puppy in snow has no category for it, so every scrap of information is new and nothing gets skipped, which is the opposite of how you move through a familiar day. Experience is efficient, and efficiency dulls things. The price of knowing what something is, is no longer quite seeing it.

Pick something you see daily and look at it this week as though you had no name for it. Your street, your hands, the ceiling over your bed. It is an odd exercise and it works surprisingly fast.