Inside your skull, your brain is floating in a silky goo. your brain resembles other brains. If someone were to scoop your brain out of your head and plop it on a counter, you wouldn’t be able to identify it from other brains on the counter. However, it is not exactly like any of the other brains. In fact, it is unlike any brain that has ever existed or any brain that will ever exist. It it your brain. Uniquely yours. And it is capable of noticing things that others don’t notice.
Here’s something. It’s better to be a person who notices things than a person who doesn’t notice things. This statement may be self-evident, but it’s worth saying. If you notice something, then you have a choice: to act on what you have noticed or to not act on it. The fact that you have become aware of something opens up the possibility for a new action, a new path, a new potential outcome. Generally in life, having more choices is better than having fewer choices.
Let’s say you’re in a coffee shop waiting to order and a stranger nearby spills some milk while pouring it into her coffee. If you noticed, then you could choose to either acknowledge it or ignore it. You could acknowledge it by, for instance, making eye contact with the stranger and simply giving her a sympathetic look. Or, if you’re feeling more social, you could offer to help mop up the spilt milk. It’s possible the interaction would lead to a conversation. It’s possible that you discover you have a mutual acquaintance, such as the owner of the coffee shop, who happens to invite you to a party, which you attend, where you meet the stranger for a second time. “Quite a coincidence,” you both agree, and you spend the evening chatting. It’s possible this new acquaintance goes on to become an important influence in your life, a singular influence in your life, the one person who introduces you to all kinds of vivid feelings including the vivid feeling of your heart tearing in two. All because you noticed the spilled milk.
(Aside. Why do we say that hearts break? That makes no sense. Hearts don’t break. Bones break. The heart is a tender muscle and muscles don’t break. Muscles strain or bruise or tear. Hearts do ache, however. We can agree on that. The ache can be excruciating and you can actually feel that pain in your chest. It can actually feel like that muscle is tearing in two.)
Back to the coffee shop where you are waiting to order, in a different iteration of the story, the stranger spills the milk, you notice, and you choose to ignore it. The woman notices that you saw the spill and you chose to turn away. She makes a snap judgment about you. “That person is unfriendly,” she thinks. At the shopowner’s party you see each other again, but since you had a non-exchange at the coffee shop, you don’t speak to each other at the party. She ends up meeting someone at the party who becomes a singular influence in her life, the one person who allows her to vividly feel the vivid feeling of her heart tearing in two.
In both scenarios, the act of noticing something (the spilt milk) introduces a new potential outcome. If you were in a coffee shop in a Marvel movie, the act of noticing might open up a new dimension in the multiverse. In each of those new dimensions, different manifestations of you face a choice — to act or not to act — and that choice creates different outcomes. It’s like one of those video games whose plot changes based on your character’s actions, or like one of those books that lets you to choose your own story progression that results in different possible endings.
In the coffee shop, these dimensions of the multiverse were created when you noticed the stranger spilling milk. But there’s another dimension of the coffee-shop multiverse, the dimension where you didn’t notice the stranger. In that dimension, you are not faced with a decision. It’s a non-event, a nothing burger. But here’s the thing. It’s also possible that the non-event for you becomes an actual event for someone else.
Let’s say you don’t notice the stranger in the coffee shop who spilled the milk, but let’s say the stranger spilled the milk intentionally, specifically trying to get your attention. Since you didn’t notice, however, now it’s the stranger who has a choice. What should she do now that you didn’t notice the intentional spill? Her choice will open new dimensions of the coffee-shop multiverse.
She could stop trying to get your attention. Or she could continue trying to get your attention by other means. Let’s say she decides to stop trying. You go about your separate ways. But then you meet at the shopowner’s party where she eventually confesses that she had seen you at the coffee shop, and possibly even confesses that she tried to get your attention by spilling milk, but you didn’t notice, and eventually she becomes the one person who allows you to vividly feel the vivid feeling of your heart tearing in two.
Where are we going with this? Let’s recap.
If you notice something, it offers you a choice: to act on it or not. Alternatively, if you don’t notice something, and others are aware that you didn’t notice, you offer them a choice: to act on that something you didn’t notice, or not act on it.
When you notice something, that observation provides new information. If one person notices something and the other doesn’t, one person has information and the other doesn’t. There is an information asymmetry. Observation is information. Information is power. Naturally, then, observation is power.
It’s better to be a person who observes things than a person who doesn’t.
This is not only true for people, but also for the animal world. When a cheetah creeps up unnoticed towards a pack of antelope, the cheetah enjoys an information advantage. The cheetah knows there are antelope nearby, yummy antelope. “Sure, they’re fast. Sure they could bolt if they see me,” the cheetah thinks, “but the closer I get to them without being noticed, the greater my advantage.” The oblivious antelope are most certainly at a disadvantage. Having or not having the information can mean the difference between life and death, survival or extinction.
The person who notices something is the person who can act on it. The person who doesn’t notice something is the person who can be acted upon. It’s the hammer to the nail, the sparrow to the snail.
Bringing it back to singular links, when you notice a unique connection between two things, that connection creates new information in your brain. The act of noticing creates a kind of triangle that includes the two things that you notice are connected and your brain floating in its cerebral goo. It is a kind of special trinity that forms. It is a trinity of awareness. That trinity is unique to you and the things you notice, and it is unique to that time when you make the connection. It is a special event of discovery.
Try to imagine a visual representation of this event. Imagine that when you notice two things are uniquely connected, there’s a kind of special highlighter pen with a special color, and it highlights your brain and the two things that you notice are uniquely connected. This color doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world. It only exists in that moment when you make that connection.
Now the world exists with millions of visible colors, and suddenly a new color has just been invented by your brain when it noticed that two things are uniquely connected. The only place where that color exists in this world is in that silky goo in your skull. That’s a cool way to see things. Keep going.
What does that color look like? Try to visualize it. Let’s say your color is whitish, maybe off-white, with overtones of pink and yellow and blue, such as you might notice if you looked closely at the surface of a pearl or a pool of gasoline floating on the wet pavement of a gas station. Let’s give this color a name. Let’s call it the color youllow.
When you notice that things are connected, you paint them with your youllow-colored goo.
Go ahead, imagine it.
You open up the top of your skull to expose your brain floating in the youllow goo. The goo has viscosity. It’s oily. It feels slippery to the touch. When you notice that two things are linked, you dip a paintbrush into that youllow goo in your skull and you paint each of those things the color youllow. The more connections you notice, the more youllow-colored events exist in the world.
If you had a special flashlight that illuminated only the youllow-colored things in the world, in the same way a blacklight illuminates only certain things like scorpions and bodily fluids, the whole world would be dark except for the connections that you have noticed. Keep going!
Try to envision these things as being physically connected to one another like the yarn-and-push-pins that secure photos and newspaper clippings to the wall of a detective. That’s a nice image. Only, when it comes to you and the things that are connected, instead of push-pins, imagine they are tagged with LED lights. Youllow-colored LED lights. There is an illumination that happens when you notice that things are connected, and it’s the light bulb that goes on above your head, and above the things that are connected. Those three youllow-colored lights add some luminosity to the world. They brighten it, maybe just a little, but brighten it nevertheless in a way that can be measured by a light meter.
As you notice more connections in the world, you add more youllow-colored lights, two by two. And eventually, you can create a youllow-colored glow that can be noticed by others.
The world needs more people who notice connections. The world needs you to use that unique brain of yours to notice the connectedness of things in the world. If you open your brain and notice enough connections in the world around you, then you too will be noticed.
Notice and be noticed.