Seeing is different to looking.

I was explaining this to someone earlier.  I looked at a pair of curtains in the room and suggested they could be used to draw across the window, offering warmth and privacy.  But to see the curtains meant I saw the material, the colour, the size, and what the curtains could become – clothing (Maria managed this in The Sound of Music*), art, blankets, dust-sheets, up-cycling into ?  To look at something is to see it within boundaries, to see something or someone is to see open-ended possibility.

Our lives can be more about looking than seeing.

I’ve been exploring how an inciting incident can tear us from a familiar reality into a new one, even from a life of looking to one of seeing.  And we can be surprised at what we find, how connected we find ourselves to be.

There’s more to you than old certainty suggested.  There’s something only you can bring into this world, emerging from your way of seeing, which I need to see too.  Deep observation allows you to be more deeply present to people and the world – it is as though you observe from within these.  Now the art you produce comes from the emerging future.

When you realise what it is you must do, you help me to understand what I must do.

To realise what you have to bring to into the world you must give it away, as James Carse suggests: ‘You can have what you have only by releasing it to others.’

(*You’ve got to love Hollywood.  I’ve been on The Sound of Music tour with a cynical Austrian guide telling us the true story.)