Spark Summer School Week 3 – Look Outside
Hello! Welcome to week 3 of the #sparksummerschool. This week we are going to be spending time Looking Outside. Last week’s focus was on Looking Inside as a way to re-consider what it is that drives our own creativity. We spent some time thinking about the nature of creativity itself, how it manifests in so […]
Books to inspire: On Looking
One of my favourite quotes (that I have stuck on my computer) is by Marcel Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” It’s a sentiment that I wholeheartedly believe and which transforms the quotidian into the extraordinary without much effort at all. This book embodies this quote.
In On Looking: about everything there is to see, author Alexandra Horowitz asks us to take a walk with her. (Well, to take twelve, actually). Her premise is that we are terrifically bad at noticing stuff. Every day we “miss the possibility of being surprised by what is hidden in plain sight right in front of us” because we are too distracted by our modern lives. We have lost the skills of attention and focus, we walk in a daydream, on autopilot going about our business. She advocates a more mindful approach, aiming to bring active attention to our daily lives by noticing new things. And these new things aren’t somewhere different and exciting, they are on your doorstep.