Can You See?
You never forget the first time. The foliage of the trees acquires incredible sharpness, billboards in the distance become finally legible, and the faces of the people you meet on the street—without having to squint—regain their physiognomy, preventing you from making yourself look like an idiot. If you have experienced these sensations, you too must have been a myopic first-time glasses wearer. And you must have suddenly seen the world bursting with those details you no longer remembered. But how long does the romance of the details last?
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Falling in Love with Details
Very little. Like when you fall in love, at first, everything is new and beautiful. Every detail is a source of amazement, and you can't take your eyes off what makes you feel so lucky to have next to you. But time passes, and you get more and more used to all this beauty. So used that you risk taking it for granted and neglecting it. If you’ve fallen in love, the secret is to nurture it to keep it burning; otherwise, it’s you that will get burned.
The same happens with the world surrounding us. Within some years of life or a few weeks wearing eyeglasses, the beauty of the details you are immersed in turns into ordinary, and you slowly go back to taking the myriad of stars dotting the night sky and the singularity of the faces of those who sit on your same bus for granted.
Can't See the Trees for the Forest
Yes. The original saying is the other way around. But when it comes to seeing, instead of not being able to see the forest for the trees, people usually are not able to see the trees for the forest. Actually, this is normal, and it is called adaptation. Think what it would mean to notice all the details, all the time. You would end up being overwhelmed within a few seconds. But thanks to human evolution, perception was made an immediate process. Drawing on your past experiences, it led you to develop shortcuts to quickly classify what is around you, based on standardized patterns. And it works even if you are not aware of it.
The Kiss of Freedom in Barcelona, Spain (via Pinterest).
This efficiency, however, is a double-edged sword. Because while you become fast at classifying and managing stimuli, this might prevent you from pausing to look at the beauty of small things. Therefore, the key is to learn how to look slowly and how to look more carefully. Putting on prescription glasses for the first time can be an epiphany that cuts through the veneer of standardization that human efficient evolution has woven over our cognitive schemas to allow us to quickly ingest endless amounts of data. But fortunately, having to fix an eyesight problem is not the only way possible, nor the best, to rediscover how beautiful and detailed the world is.
The Power of Arts
René Magritte, Ceci n’est pas une pipe via Pinterest
To truly see, you have to go beyond first appearances and start questioning everything you perceive. In this regard, art is the best training ground because it engages both sight and insight, training your perception to become more sensitive to details. Like the Little Prince (by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) asking the Pilot to draw him a sheep, art asks you not to jump to conclusions—drawing just a common sheep—but rather to think about things and come up with a detailed yet simple interpretation of reality—a big enough box in which the sheep is sleeping. While it is true that some forms of art are not within everyone’s reach—such as sculpture, design, painting, or theatre—there is one which is at everybody’s hand: drawing. Everything you need, indeed, is a piece of paper and a pencil. But how could drawing ever help you to thoroughly see the world?
The Magic of Drawing
The secret is to look at everything as if you were seeing it for the first time. Betty Edwards—an American art teacher and best-selling author—wrote a book about drawing (Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain), investigating the very best techniques to allow people to get rid of standardized schemas of world representation. She argues that the predominance of the left side of the brain—the one mainly involved with language—has somehow muted the right hemisphere over the centuries, preventing people from seeing things the way they really are. Through different drawing exercises, she offers her readers the instruments to deconstruct their standardized perception, leaving the right side of the brain space and time to slowly look at things and to recreate them thoroughly, one line, curve, feature at a time. It is not about becoming the new Picassos, but it is about acquiring the ABCs of visual perception:
The perception of edges (where one thing ends, and another starts)
The perception of spaces (what lies beyond, beside, in front, etc.)
The perception of relationships (perspective and proportionality)
The perception of light (light and shadows of colors and scenes)
The perception of the so-called Gestalt (the ability to see the whole and its parts).
In this sense, a nose will no longer be a stereotyped nose, drawn the way you did when you were 8 years old. On the contrary, it will be a composition of different kinds of lines, meeting and separating at different points, set in the frame of a visage, blending different kinds of shades together. It will appear as a masterpiece, giving each face its own look. And this kind of observational method can be applied not only to noses but to everything.
Image by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash
Drawing and exercising your perceptual skills, things will surprise you with all the details that were always at your sight, but that you might have been neglecting since you were a child. And eventually, you’ll become able to see the world through these brand-new lenses, turning the world from being the frame of your boring routine into a wonderful scenario, marvelously decorating and enriching your every day’s life.
