How to Have Fresh Eyes Without Going Away
In our early farming years when the children were still young, holidays away were pretty rare and of short duration.
I can remember returning from one break and looking in at the farm courtyard from the road. In the moment I was aware that something was different. I looked around carefully at the buildings surrounding the concrete yard. I could see the sand pile with some children’s toys. The vine growing in front of the cottage. A hay stack through an open door. All were there as we had left them.
It’s just that they looked different.
There was something new about them. Something different.
Then I realized that it was my eyes. They felt fresh. I was seeing my own familiar place through fresh eyes. This place that I had been living and working in (and rarely left) felt and looked new to me.
The feeling was so strong and unusual for me that I continued looking around appreciating the farmscape around me.
When I described the experience to my wife a little later, she knew immediately what I was talking about. She is an artist and knows about seeing. I remember her saying once after hosting an art class on the farm, “They come to learn drawing, but I’m really teaching them how to see.”
The ‘fresh eyes’ did not last long for me that day. The effect faded in less than an hour. And then everything looked normal again.
However it could return, if I allowed it, after other trips away from the farm — as long as I took time not to completely immerse myself back in the place and the doing, my fresh eyes would be there for a little while.
Reflecting on the experience, although a little sad at the absence of my fresh eyes, I realised that we would be overloaded with sensory input if everything was fresh all the time. It would be difficult to function — to get through a daily routine.
However, for creative thinking purposes (and sheer pleasure) it is valuable to be able to see things anew. You notice more. You see different things. You see things differently. You get different ideas.
So can you learn to do this? Can you get fresh eyes without going away?
Here are 4 ways that I have found helpful. Other contributions are welcome!
- MAINTAIN AWARENESS. I’m aware how it feels to see with ‘fresh eyes’. I know that can happen regularly. I know the difference it makes. I remember to look for it and to use ways that I’ve found work to reproduce it.
- SHARPEN YOUR SEEING — this has two parts: focusing and noticing.
a) Focusing
It can help to focus on something small to see it differently.
In one scene in ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ Robert Pirsig describes helping a student who was finding it difficult to write about a building across the street. You’re not looking! he said and advised her to… narrow it down…start with the upper left hand brick. The student tried it and to their surprise words came tumbling out.
b) Noticing
I don’t consider myself a particularly visual person. I am more audial — I am very attentive to words and music.
However, in the last few weeks as I have started writing Medium articles, I have spent time (sometimes a lot of time!) looking through photos online to try and find images that accompany the writing.
A few days ago my wife and I spent a long weekend in Sidmouth, South Devon at a folk music festival. Sidmouth is a beautiful small town by the sea. As we walked through some beautiful gardens above the sea I realised that some of the sights around me had the quality of the images I had been poring over.
Without conscious effort I found myself looking at them through my iphone. I took some photos. For the next hour as we walked around I kept taking photos of interesting sights. My wife was amused that I was lagging behind as we walked. When I reviewed them later I marked 6 as having some potential for use with writing.
3. USE TOOLS
One of Edward de Bono’s thinking tools — OPV — is a good example here.
OPV stands for ‘Other points of view’. It provides a simple 3 step routine:
For a given subject,
i) identify someone else who has a point of view
ii) step into their shoes (figuratively) and look through their eyes
iii) how does it look? what do you see?
This simple act causes you to see a situation with fresh eyes.
4. INVOLVE OTHERS
In May 1987, my wife and set up a new ice cream making enterprise in a tiny shop by the harbour in Torquay, UK. It was a big leap of faith based on a hunch and plenty of encouragement from our children. For the first few days we had almost no customers. One or two looked in but didn’t go further.
As we were closing up we had a visitor — Rosie, a lovely fortune teller who had a site not far away. She asked how it was going. We told her. She looked at the shop and the ice cream scooping cabinet.
She said “you need to move the cabinet closer to the door, so people can see it without having to come into the shop. Do it and you will be successful!”
We did and we were.
Bring in other people, particularly people with different backgrounds and skills. They’ll bring their thinking, their experience and also their fresh eyes. If you want to enliven a brainstorming session, introduce an artist or a musician or a writer.
Try one or more of the above next time you need ‘fresh eyes’ and don’t have time to go on holiday first.
Peter Redstone and his artist wife live in South Devon, UK in a converted cowshed. Their 4 children all grew up on the farm before spreading their wings. Peter has been a management consultant, an organic dairy farmer and ice cream maker in the 1980’s and 90’s and now works in science leadership training. He teaches creative thinking and admits to being a mind mapping missionary.
