Okay. What I'm going to ask you to is really weird/awkward/obscure. But I promise you, I have my reasons to ask you to do this. This may be pointless. You might get some strange looks from people you don't know. Someone might even come up to you and tell you to stop. Or, this may be a total success and you get a lot out of it. That's what I'm hoping for. So don't get scared yet, just keep reading, and then hopefully you'll decide to do what I want you to. If you don't, then well, you'll be the only one it retaliates on. So. Just keep reading.
I want you to look at everything.
No. I am absolutely not kidding. I honestly want you to look at strangers, acquaintances, friends, enemies, family members, neighbors, everyone. Watch animals. Watch things. Watch people. Watch the plants, the cars, the tires on the car. Watch people riding on bikes, walking to school, or eating a sandwich. Watch everything—well, almost everything.
Here's the hard part of this. It may seem easy, but I promise you, it's a lot more difficult then you think. Don't watch the main thing that's going on. If someone's in a car accident, don't look at the cars, the damage, or even the people involved. Look beyond that. Look at the background, the scenery, the things around them. Are there birds flying towards the accident, or away from it? How are the people in the cars driving by reacting towards this? How fast is the water in the puddles, lake, river or ocean moving? Look at the background. Don't watch what's going on, the usual focal point of everyone's attention. Look at the things no one pays attention to, the smallest things that could make the biggest difference. The things that just add to what's going on. It sounds easy, but trust me, when someone shoots someone else, it's gonna be a lot harder to notice what color the sunset is.
Don't just watch either. Listen. Again, here's the challenge: don't listen to the main points of conversation. Listen to the background. If there's a bus driving by, making all kinds of loud, annoying noises, listen to the trees blowing, or the other, smaller cars exhaust. Listening is a lot harder than watching is. It is proven that you automatically listen to things that someone yells, or loud noises, whether it be directed towards you, or not. You're intrigued. Interested. You might not be, but your mind is. If someone's yelling, shouldn't it be important, or worth listening to?
So, that's your challenge. Watch and listen to things, people and animals. Everything.
After reading that, you may be thinking, "I spent 3 good minutes or more of my life reading something about a girl telling us to LISTEN?" or something like that. So, like all my other posts, I will tell you the purpose of me actually writing this, and hope you understand what I'm saying.
By doing this, you can learn a lot. Yes. I know. Learning is boring. Learning is stupid. Learning is for school/nerds/geeks. I've heard it all before. But you're not learning how to write quadratic functions, or graph exponential growth. You're learning about people. People you know, and people you don't. In more specificity, you're learning about society and how it works, and why it works that way. You're getting different opinions and perspectives. But overall, you may learn about yourself.
By sitting there and watching dogs walk into yards for 20 minutes, you can learn a lot about yourself. Yes, you can learn the more obvious, external things, such as, you want a dog, you like that breed of dog, the color of the dog is cute, dogs are cute, blah blah blah. Or, you may learn a simple characteristic of yourself. Like, you have an incredibly short attention span and cannot focus on one thing for long. Or you're impatient, and waiting for what you're watching to do something interesting is taking too long. Or, if you really try, you'll learn something incredibly new about yourself, your emotions, your mind. You'll realize why you're so drawn to the background, what it's there for. You'll realize that everything has a purpose, and you have yours. You'll learn more about the world, and not the physical world, but the people within it, and how they think. How they feel. Maybe you'll realize you're not alone.
So, as I have stated above, multiple times, please: look, watch, see, hear, and experience. Learn.
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