The Art of Noticing: Finding Perspective in Everyday Journey
Updated: Sep 9
The journey we stop noticing
In our increasingly busy lives, it is remarkable how easily we stop noticing the world around us. A journey that may once have felt interesting or even beautiful gradually becomes part of the background: the same roads, the same buildings, the same familiar intersections, travelled so often that we barely register them. We walk, drive or take public transport while our attention is already somewhere else, occupied by the meeting ahead, the message we need to answer or the list of things waiting for us when we arrive. We reach our destination, often without remembering much of the journey at all.
Yet outside the window, something is always happening.
The light changes from one morning to the next. Trees move quietly in the breeze, birds begin their morning chorus and flowers appear, disappear and return with the seasons. Buildings that we pass every day catch the sun differently depending on the hour, the weather and the time of year. Nature continues its quiet work around us, entirely indifferent to how busy we are.
Over the years, I have often asked people how they feel about their daily journey to work. Most describe it as stressful, repetitive or simply necessary, something to get through before the real day begins. What is interesting is how rarely they remember what they actually saw along the way. It made me wonder how much of our lives we experience almost entirely from the inside of our own thoughts, moving through familiar places without really being present in them.
Perhaps the journey itself does not need to change. Perhaps our attention does.
There is something surprisingly restorative about looking up from a phone and allowing yourself to notice what is already there. The particular colour of the morning sky, the way sunlight catches a building, the movement of branches against an otherwise quiet street, or even a small detail in a place you have passed hundreds of times but never properly looked at. None of these things requires time, money or planning. They simply require that, for a moment, we stop rushing ahead of ourselves.
I have always loved What a Wonderful World by Louis Armstrong for precisely this reason. Its charm lies in its simplicity. It does not describe some extraordinary landscape or an impossible life. It notices blue skies, trees, flowers, people and ordinary human moments, and finds enough beauty in them to make the world feel larger.
Life will always be busy. There will always be responsibilities, pressure, uncertainty and things that need our attention. We cannot remove all of that, nor should we pretend that a beautiful view solves everything. But we can choose whether we allow every journey to become another period of mental noise, or whether we occasionally give ourselves permission to be where we actually are.
There is a familiar idea that when you cannot change what you are looking at, you can change the way you look at it. Perhaps that is less a piece of advice than an invitation to reconsider how much of everyday life is quietly available to us if we become a little more observant.
Tomorrow morning, take the usual route. Let the traffic be traffic and the journey be the journey, but look around you properly for once. Notice the light, the trees, the buildings, the people and the small changes that have happened while you were busy looking elsewhere. You may find that nothing about the journey has changed at all.
Only your experience of it.
Written by Dayiana Oballos / VOS Consultants
Co - Founder & Commercial Architecture Advisor / VOS Consultants
About the Author : Dayiana Oballos is Co-Founder and Commercial Architecture Advisor at VOS Consultants. With more than 30 years of international experience across luxury hospitality, branded residences and mixed-use developments, she advises developers on aligning commercial strategy, buyer experience and operational delivery to improve long-term project performance.
Great Article 😀