Tourists walk slowly and locals get annoyed. Sometimes the slow one sees more.

REFLECTION

WHAT THIS MEANS

Familiarity speeds you up and costs you the view. Once you know a route you stop looking at it, which is efficient and also means you can pass the same building for years without noticing it, while a visitor who has never seen it stands there taking it in. Slowness is not always ignorance. Sometimes it is just attention.

Walk one familiar route at half your usual pace this week and look up as you go. Find one thing you had never registered. Being briefly annoying to the people behind you is an acceptable price.

A QUESTION TO SIT WITH

Could you move through your own town at a visitor’s pace?

MORE IN PERCEPTION & ATTENTION

Free, with nothing to buy inside it.