I remember my first visit to New York City when I walked into a deli to order some breakfast. There was a cacophony of activity and voices and characters scurrying around like ants in a tree stump. Someone yelled from behind the counter, “Who’s next,” and two or three people shouted their orders. The deli worker shouted back the loudest order and spun away to prepare it. Others were entering behind me and shouting their orders and getting served before me. To Manhattanites, this was just how you order breakfast. But to me, with my visitor eyes, the whole system seemed primal, transacitonal, verging on anarchy. A couple of days into my trip, however, I was yelling, “Egg and cheese on a roll!”
When you first visit a new place, you see it with visitor eyes. You absorb a kaleidescope of details that form a first impression.
You may note, for instance, that the street signs are painted a different color and use a different font, the pedestrians’ outfits are out of step with yours, the models of cars are unusual, as are their license plates, the air carries unfamiliar frangrants.
The new place reveals itself to you, and your senses are hungry to gobble up new information.
But then, as you become familiar with a place, your relationship with your surroundings begins to change. The place metamorphosizes from something unknown to something known. Initially, all its details were novel and intriguing, but eventually they become its defining characteristics. The pace of your discoveries begins to slow. Surprises may still occur, but at increasingly longer intervals. Soon you change from the person who asks for directions to the person who gives directions.
When you start getting used to a place, the way you see it changes, and those changes emerge in ways that you wouldn’t notice unless you paid close attention. After initial sigthings you continue to see the characteristics of that place, of course – the street signs, the pedestrians outfits, the license plates – only instead of providing new information to help form your impression, now they serve to confirm your existing impression.
Exploring a place for the first time is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what’s on the picture. Before you have seen the whole picture, each piece is special. It adds new information. And some pieces add lots of new information. However, after you have completed the puzzle and you know how the whole picture appears, none of the pieces are particularly special on their own. They only serve as individual units in conjunction with all the other units to form the picture.
The puzzle piece goes from special to ordinary, from valuable to banal. In an interesting twist, the puzzle piece only becomes valuable again if it goes missing. Its absence is what makes it conspicuous.
If you don’t believe me, consider baseball cards. The entire set of Topps baseball cards from 1952 has a total of 408 cards. If you had all those cards, you might not want to hold them in your bare hands because you would be holding a jackpot worth millions. However, if you were to remove just one card, the value of that set would drop by more than the value of the individual card. And, if you were to remove a special card, such as the Mickey Mantle rookie card (#311), the value of your set would plummet. Sometimes things are more valuable when they are absent.
That’s just supply and demand: withhold the supply and its value increases.
But that’s not the point I wanted to make. The point I wanted to make is about visitor eyes. When a place is new, it holds a certain specialness, until it is no longer new, at which point it becomes commonplace.
The same thing happens with new relationships. When you first meet someone, the person’s quirks are noteworthy. Their oddities and eccentricities are part of the charicature that forms in your mind. They are novel, intriguing. They invoke in you a curiosity to learn more about them. But eventually, those same indiosyncrasies that caught your eye become the defining aspects of who they are. At first they defined your view, and later they serve to confirm your view.
When you first meet the guy with the crooked nose, that feature causes you to stare at length at his face and note how it appears from different angles. You wonder, how had that man’s nose changed over time to arrive at the unusual shape today? You used to wonder that when you first encountered him. Now when you see him, you just see Harry, the guy with the crooked nose.
One of the most valuable accomplishments you can make is to see commonplace objects in new ways. Those who reveal the novelty in familiar things are worth their weight in gold.
In the 1990s, astronomers hotly debated what the Hubble Space Telescope should be used to explore. Some advocated to explore one of the sky’s many dark patches, those inky blotches whose only noteworthy characteristic was its absence of any noteworthy characteristic. Many disagreed – the telescope’s resources were far too valuable to waste on dark patches, they argued. However, when they turned the telescope to observe a seemingly blank area, it revealed thousands of previously unseen galaxies. And what’s more, each galaxy contained billions of stars.
The point is, never lose sight of visitor eyes!