Walk a route you always walk and look up. There’s a whole second floor to your town.
REFLECTION
WHAT THIS MEANS
Your eyes learn a route and then stop surveying it. On a walk you have done a thousand times, your gaze settles at the height of sidewalks and shop windows because that is where the useful information is, and everything above the first floor quietly stops existing. The old signs, the dates carved into brickwork, the windows with somebody’s life behind them have been there all along.
Do tomorrow’s walk with your chin up. Pick one street and look only at the top halves of the buildings. It takes no extra minutes, and it is the cheapest way to live somewhere more interesting than you did yesterday.
A QUESTION TO SIT WITH
What sits above eye level on a street you know well?
MORE IN PERCEPTION & ATTENTION
- Work retail during the holidays and you’ll see every kind of person in one afternoon. Most of them are just tired.
- People in experiments have missed a stranger swapping places mid-conversation. Don’t be so sure you saw it all.
- The quiet friend’s playlist will tell you more about them than a year of small talk.
Free, with nothing to buy inside it.