Looking Closely is Everything

Metadata

• Author: [[Craig Mod]]
• Full Title: Looking Closely is Everything
• Category: #articles
• URL: https://craigmod.com/essays/looking_closely/

Highlights

• I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.
• Words are magic. Words are really magic. They add so much. You can take a TikTok video, and you think the TikTok video is the end in itself. You don’t need any gloss on that, but you absolutely do. It’s so much funnier if you can articulate what is embarrassing or weird or impressive about what that person is doing. That is a great hack. If you’re stuck on something, especially if you’re trying to do a project, just put a picture of your subject in front of you and sit down and say, “Okay. Describe visually this person for someone who has no idea who they are,” or “Watch this 10-second clip and write down what happens,” and in writing down the details, you start to understand what’s some interesting about it.
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• This seems to say to me: Only untrained minds are boring. Or: Nothing in the world is bereft of delight. Looking closely helps unlock this delight, this wonder, this doofy curiosity. Huh, I recommend eating chips? I do.
• What’s wild about focused attention is that the act of observation is implicitly timeless. A little dose of time travel. To look closely you must be present. And the more present you are, the more you move outside the boundaries of time. Similarly: During a seasoned meditation session — because you aren’t focused on how much time has passed or how much is left, because you’re observing, say, breath with a kind of total equanimity and stillness — time simply evaporates, as if in a dream.
• There is a fine line between extracting meaning from looking closely and from imposing meaning. A sophisticated observer operates like a scientist, drawing direct and clear lines between what’s on the page and what is known and true.
• The resistance in the stories is quiet, at a slant, and comes from perhaps the most radical idea of all: that every human being is worthy of attention and that the origins of every good and evil capability of the universe may be found by observing a single, even very humble, person and the turnings of his or her mind.
• I hope so. Because looking closely at dang near anything in this world of ours might very well be the key to it all.