Still thinking about: Paying Attention

Still thinking about: Paying Attention 

In our podcast episode with Laura Karasinski, she told me she renovated an old apartment, old as in protected as a historic monument, and chose its wall paint colors almost entirely by instinct. Later, when preparing the walls for paint, layers of wallpaper were scraped away and they discovered that nearly the same shades had been used there around 200 years earlier. To someone like me, who paints all walls eggshell white because with anything else the chances of it going wrong are way too high, this sounds slightly supernatural.   

Was that instinct? Two people, hundreds of years apart, who happen to have the same taste? Or did Laura notice things most of us would have overlooked?  

Later in our conversation, Laura described that for her, having ideas feels like  ‘downloading them from above’. I told her I wished my brain worked like that, but the more I thought about it, the less mysterious it seemed. Laura also mentioned how much time she spends looking around when waiting for cabs. She observes choices made by others in buildings, materials, patterns, and everything else there is to see. So maybe ideas don’t just appear from nowhere. Maybe they are much more connected to years of paying attention.  

I’ve always been slightly jealous of people who seem to know instinctively which fonts look good together in which size, which colors work where, which fabric belongs next to which wallpaper. For a long time, I assumed some people simply had that kind of talent and others did not. 

Recently, I was struggling with layouts for the curious and complained to a few graphic designer friends that I could never come up with ideas like theirs without feeling as though I was copying someone. Their answer was basically: of course, you look at how other people do it . You collect references, notice patterns and learn from what already exists. 
This might be obvious to some, but to me it certainly wasn’t. If someone had an idea, it had already been done. I needed to come up with something completely new from scratch, right? 

Apparently not. The idea is not to copy someone else’s work, of course. But noticing it. Studying it. Remembering what caught your eye and trying to understand why.  

This is where curiosity comes in. It is much easier to pay attention when we are genuinely interested in what we are looking at. I tend to think of curiosity as a ‘she’, for whatever reason,and lately I’ve been wondering whether letting her lead the way might simply mean learning to notice more. 

I’ve noticed the same thing while hosting our podcast. The best conversations rarely happen when I am thinking about the next question on my list. They happen when I properly listen to what the person opposite me is saying and let my curiosity follow that instead. 

What stayed with me after talking to Laura is the thought that inspiration may not need to be forced quite as much as I thought, and maybe creativity is not something some have more than others.  

Maybe it really is all about paying better attention. To look at what is already there, follow what interests us and slowly learn to connect things we might otherwise have missed. 

And perhaps then, it will at some point feel a little like something has been downloaded from above.