Observation is Beyond the Details
Observation isn’t just in the details. It’s actually a process, a process that involves three cyclical steps. Anticipation, intake, and response.
Observations help to make life fuller, more enjoyable. They allow us to live in a world that’s always ripe for a moment of mindfulness. When I was a kid in elementary school, my music teacher wanted us to learn how to pick out a voice or instrument in a composition. She had us listen for the trombones or pick out a voice and see if we could follow it through a song. She did this several times at the beginning of the year and then once or twice a week on and off after that.
It didn’t dawn on me until later that she was helping us appreciate the piece in a much fuller way. We weren’t subject to becoming overwhelmed with more complex pieces later on if we learned how to break things down early on. It also helped us with playing and singing songs later, as we knew what the layers would sound like both individually and together.
Observation in life is just that; it takes us out of the overwhelming world and sticks us into the foundations of it. We carry the pieces with us and build them back to construct something much more sound than before.
For this article, let’s perchance to say the reader feels they live in a world hidden to them, even though they see it everyday. They go out, see a bird, building, street, gathering of people, and the meaning or history of the scene escapes them. For them, the anticipation of the scene is now shrouded in mystery. Their proverbial curiosity is up.
Anticipation is the most discriminatory, and it’s also the hardest to overcome. Prejudice, ignorance, and apriorism make up the roots of the difficulty, but they are also the easiest to overcome. The key is to increase knowledge. Each root problem is related to a lack of knowledge or a disruption of knowledge.
Intake is when the senses are being used to observe the world. The reader sees, hears, smells, tastes, or feels whatever is in the environment. It’s like a camera taking in raw data.
Response is using the gained knowledge of the intake and apprising one’s self of what was actually observed with the senses.
Sometimes it’s hard to focus on one thing; the intake has no target. Let’s take the observation of a building as a base example. The observer anticipates seeing the building to and from work. There’s no real context other than the building is there. The intake without guidance is to see the building. It’s there! But, the observer is curious to learn more. Good. That’s the beginning.
To gain focus the before intake, the observer has to ask some anticipatory questions. Where is the building? The old part of town? The new part? How tall is it? (This is actually a pretty good question, as it helps narrow down certain time frames.) Is the building brick? Marble? Does the building have any names on it? Is it more similar to older types of architecture or is it more modern looking? Once the observer has a few questions down, the next observation intake should be used to answer those questions. Look for the answers in the context of the surroundings.
The next step is to respond to the intake. Did they find an answer in the intake? Were there names? Does the building look new or old? How does one tell? Is there a distinct address to check?
This is where response and anticipation begin to merge, and the cycle begins again. The reader is now anticipating the pieces, uses knowledge to seed the intake, and the response is empty in some places. There are still questions to answer. Gathering basic information begins to fill those responses. In the building example, the response could be to do a basic internet search to find the building’s address and see if a name is associated with it. This could lead to a short history of the construction process. Perhaps the top windows were not built the same way as the lower windows. Maybe it’s a building that is perfectly symmetrical. The observer just learned something new to anticipate on the next observation.
Let’s say instead of a building, the observer is interested in a bird they keeps seeing on their lunch break. The anticipation here is probably the time of day and year the bird appears. The observer notices the color and size of the bird. Then, they hear the bird’s song. A quick search of a bird identification app gives the name and a few common details. The reader now knows the bird is a common type of gull that has become dependent on human interactions. The gull could live on both land or sea, but it now prefers the company of humans. The reader now sees the bird all over. The anticipation is acute. The intake is sharpened as awareness grows. The response is now emotional, and it colors the anticipation.
In another observation, the gathering of people happens to be a local choral group coming to practice each week. They meet on the streets, but the observer missed the performances because of work. Now the response becomes deterministic, and anticipations change as well as plans. The observer takes off early to catch that performance.
The response now fuels further anticipation of new pieces of information. What choral piece did they perform? Who wrote it and why? The reader’s world becomes fuller, less hidden, more opaque in detail, more translucent in meaning.
Life at this point has become fuller, more acute in the moment. The daily grind has been shaved away to just a footnote of what’s happening. The observer has their own vignette to cozy into. The details, they don’t matter as much now as the process does.
