
I look and see: skillfully deployed rules of thirds, monochromatic palette, cold evening along a mountain road, strange guy with funny hat (?). Take, for example, this image of Kambara, the sixteenth post town: Kambara, Hiroshige (via Met) John’s book begins each chapter with a very matter-of-fact description of each print. In the early 1800s, the famous woodblock printmaster Hiroshige produced the “The Fifty-Three stations of the Tōkaidō.” Fifty-three prints, one for each post-town along the road. As I walked I read John McBride’s excellent (unpublished) guide to the road. This time, I walked the Tōkaidō covering some 700km between Tokyo and Kyoto along the coast. In November 2020 I set out on another one of my giant walks. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.įor me, these last few months have vibrated into a fever pitch of huhs and looking ever-closer. You gotta go huh, alright - the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. 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. I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh. It scales and it cascades - one cognizant detail begets another and then another. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government.

The point being: Looking closely is valuable at every scale.

2 Perhaps you noticed how different countries handled the pandemic (how could you not), and from that you recognized the flaws and strengths of the varied responses, and in that the cracks in social systems that we hitherto took for granted. Maybe you noticed how exhausted you are by video calls, but in noticing that you recognized that it’s really the audio delays and wonky noise cancellation that makes video so stressful. 1With that in mind, I’ve been trying to get better at this, this deceptively simple act of looking closer.īy dint of pandemic stasis, I suspect we’ve all gotten better at closer looking. Perhaps you’ve noticed the subtle slant of the floor of the room in which you’ve been stuck for months on end, or the daily rhythms of that one old dude on your neighborhood block that you’ve now walked around a million times. Looking closely at dang near anything might very well be the key to it all.
