Learning to observe

Let us try an experiment. Tomorrow, count how many times you say “it’s not going well” before the evening. You can say it out loud or only think it: both count.

Many people with heightened perception say this sentence to me. What they perceive passes through them too forcefully. So they note it, in the morning, in the evening, and often in between.

Now look at fig. 1. It is a staircase. In the morning, you are at the top. Each time you say the sentence, you go down a step. You have done nothing but talk, and in the evening you are sitting at the bottom.

The sentence did not calm you. It explained nothing to you. It only made you go down. Noting an imbalance every day means settling into it. I think you already sensed this.

Your days are not all alike

You sensed it for a good reason: you are not always at the bottom of the staircase. On some days, you have the same life, and it weighs less. What you perceive does not overwhelm you.

Look at fig. 2. Your days are like hills. Today, you may be in the hollow. But behind you, there is a summit: a better day, which really happened. And ahead of you, there is another one.

This fact is usually forgotten. Yet it is the most useful thing you know: better has already happened to you, and it will come back.

The question no one asks

So I ask you a simple question. The last day you were at the top of the hill, what was different? What state were you in just before? What had put you in that state?

Almost everyone answers me: “I don’t know.”

That is normal. No one looks. The bad days, we endure. The good days, we consume. We study neither. This can go on for years, without anyone having looked even once.

A cup falls

The solution fits in one word: observe. It is a small word, and it asks a great deal.

Observing is not analysing. It is not struggling. It is not telling yourself again that it is not going well. It is looking at what is happening, then looking at your own reaction.

Look at fig. 3. A cup falls from the table: that is the event. In the middle, someone raises their arms: that is the reaction. These are two different things, even if they happen almost at the same time.

Now look at the figure on the right. It is the same person, one step back. They see the cup, and they see their reaction. Whoever sees both is already no longer entirely caught up in the second.

Draw a leaf

You may think that everyone knows how to look, since everyone has eyes. Let us try a second experiment.

Take a pencil and draw a tree leaf from memory. Then go and find a real one and put it next to your drawing.

Look at fig. 4. Above, the leaf we think we know. Below, the leaf that is there, with its irregular edges, its veins and its small hole. You had an idea of the leaf, and that idea replaced what you saw.

Observing is therefore a capacity. Like any capacity, we do not have it in advance. It is learned, and it takes practice.

The ancients had a school for this: drawing from nature. You sit in front of a tree, a stone or an insect, and you draw what is there. The result does not matter at all. What counts is that the hand forces the eye: it makes you look at the thing as it is, line after line, for as long as it takes.

This time spent in nature calms what no repeated complaint has ever calmed. One hour a week in front of a tree, pencil in hand, teaches you more about observing than years spent noting that it is not going well.

In the evening, look at your day

The same gesture then turns towards you.

In the evening, replay your day in your head, like a film. You are not the actor: you are sitting in the audience. You do not ruminate, you watch. Look at fig. 5: you see yourself from afar, as you would see another person.

Then ask yourself the questions of the drawing. What did this person do today? With whom? Where? In what state? In what circumstances? And the question that changes everything: did they choose it, or endure it?

You will discover your day as you discovered the leaf. You thought you knew it, and you had not looked at it.

Write it down

One thing remains to be done: write it down. Memory distorts what it keeps, a little like your first drawing of the leaf.

Write precisely. “I felt bad” teaches nothing. “At three o’clock, after a meeting, my throat was tight” teaches something. A vague note teaches nothing. A precise fact always teaches.

The journal of the Δ Delta-Score app was made for this. Each evening you write a few lines in it: what you did, with whom, where, in what state, chosen or endured. Next to it is your daily record. After a few weeks, its curves show you what an impression never shows: what comes before your good days, and what comes before the others.

Sometimes you will find what preceded a good day. Sometimes you will find nothing: better came, and nothing explains it. Note that too. It happens, and it deserves to be seen.

All this takes a few minutes a day. That is precisely why it is not done: the discipline seems too small for a problem that feels big. The opposite is true.

We do not get out of a state by cursing it. We get out of it by understanding it. And understanding begins by learning to observe.

M. Mischa Harmeijer, Centre EPÉU

Centre EPÉU — Château de Villereglan, Saint-Martin-de-Villereglan (Aude) · the site chat

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