Recently, I’ve been writing about Thoreau and Oliver and how they remind me to pay attention to the world. There’s magic to be found in the ordinary world, even if we don’t always take the time to recognize it. We walk through our days surrounded by small but still remarkable things: the way the afternoon light falls across the grass, the sound of rain against a window, or the scent of a familiar recipe cooking on the stove. Most of the time, we let these moments pass without a second thought. After all, there are errands to run, responsibilities to attend to, and places to go. 

I wrote a lot about allowing ourselves the grace to pause now and then in The Swirl and Swing of Words. What if we allowed ourselves to become curious about the things we usually overlook? What if we began to see the ordinary world not as objects to get past on our way to somewhere else, but as a source of endless fascination?

For writers, learning to notice the ordinary may be one of the most valuable creative practices we can have. Noticing teaches us to look more closely at the world and the people who inhabit it, to ask questions, and to discover stories we want to tell. When we think about writing, we often think about the act of putting words on a page. We imagine the writer sitting at a desk, pencil behind one ear, searching a dictionary for the perfect word. One thing I’ve learned over the years is that, yes, if you want to be a writer you have to put words on the page, but in reality the writing begins long before we sit down at our desks. It begins with paying attention and noticing details that no one else notices.

A writer notices the things other people might overlook. I think this is because people who are drawn to writing are naturally more observant people. We notice eye movements and facial expressions and hand gestures. We notice what isn’t being said. I also think that writers learn to recognize that there is more to an ordinary moment than first meets the eye. Have you ever passed a house with its curtains drawn on a sunny afternoon? Someone who noticed the drawn curtains might wonder why the curtains are closed. Is someone sleeping inside? Is the house empty? This is true of almost everything around us. An old photograph becomes a question about the past. Who are the people in the photograph? What were they thinking and feeling when that photo was taken?

When Charles Dickens was growing in fame as an author, one comment readers often made about his writing was that he noticed things that people passed every day and didn’t pay attention to. He became popular because he showed people the world they lived in: the odd characters, the strange circumstances, the bizarre legal system, and other facets of Victorian life that people didn’t pay attention to because they were too busy getting through their days. Dickens paid attention to the minute details around him, and he shared those details through his novels. His ability to describe everyday life is a big reason why his characters and stories come to life on the page.

We tend to think of creativity as something that happens when a spark sets our imagination running with ideas. But curiosity doesn’t require either a spark or inspiration. To be curious, we only need to ask questions. We don’t need to answer those questions, either, since asking them can be enough to prompt us to look more closely. Dickens was immensely curious about people and places, especially London. Curiosity allows us to approach the world without assuming that we already understand it. Instead of rushing toward a conclusion, we give ourselves permission to ask, “What if…” I’ve always believed that the moment we think we know everything about a subject, it’s time to find a new subject. Curiosity keeps us open to surprises, and those surprises often lead to rabbit holes of research where we find one topic after another fascinating and we want to learn more. Lately I’ve been reading about Ancient Egypt for no other reason than I find it interesting. The novelist in me wonders if there’s a project in there somewhere, but for right now I’m fighting that impulse. I’m allowing myself to follow my curiosity right now, and that’s enough.

So much of life is spent looking ahead. We think about what we need to accomplish, where we want to go, and what we hope will happen next. We measure our days by what we’ve finished and our years by what we’ve achieved. I’ve fallen into this trap as much as anyone. It’s easy to overlook the life we have while we’re busy planning and working toward the life we want.

Paying attention, even to the little things that seem too ordinary to notice, is a way for us to be in the moment we’re actually living rather than treating our day-to-day lives as a waiting room for the next stage. I wonder how much of our own lives we miss because we’re looking for something extraordinary instead of what we already have.

Maybe the most important thing noticing teaches us is that there are beautiful, interesting things to see every day. We don’t have to travel far to find something to pay attention to. We don’t need a dramatic change in circumstances. We can begin with the life we’re already living and find small, beautiful things every day. We can look more closely at the books on our shelves, the food on our plates, the photographs in our boxes, and the people we see. We can become interested in how things came to be the way they are. We can follow a question wherever it leads, even when the answer serves no practical purpose because I’m not using it to write an essay or a novel.

For writers who follow their curiosity, this kind of attention is a gift because suddenly the world is an inexhaustible source of images, questions, quotations, characters, and ideas. Even if you’re not a writer, curiosity is still a gift. Being curious means being open to learning. Even familiar things contain mysteries we haven’t yet considered. Maybe a topic to write about will grow out of that. Maybe it won’t. We can be interested just for the sake of being interested. Maybe instead of always being focused on producing something, we can simply look at the world and wonder.