Noticing: The Forgotten Skill of a Modern Life

We were walking into an office for a meeting, my colleague and I. One of several that week. Same coffee, same air-conditioning, same polite smiles. She paused. A plant that usually sat near the reception desk had moved. Just a neat green burst of life in a ceramic pot, now sitting by the window.

She found the gardener, tapped him on the shoulder, and asked where it had gone.

He smiled and pointed to the window. He had moved it there himself, for the light. Then, after a pause, he said, with real surprise, "But... you noticed?"

She told me this story later, still a little delighted by it. And the more I turned it over, the more it stayed with me. Not the plant. The gardener's surprise. How rare it has become to notice.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Jewish philosopher who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and spent a lifetime trying to shake the modern world awake, had a phrase for what my colleague did that morning. He called it Radical Amazement.

The art of seeing the world as if for the first time. He warned that the real poverty of modern life was not a shortage of money, but a loss of wonder. The day nothing surprises us anymore, he said, is the day the world feels used up before breakfast.

That warning was written decades ago. It has aged well.

The Two Acts

Noticing and wonder are related, but they are not the same thing. Noticing is the first act. It is paying attention, being present enough to see what is actually in front of you rather than what you expect to be there. My colleague noticed the plant. Most people walked past it.

Wonder is what comes next. It is the question that noticing provokes. And the relationship runs in both directions. Noticing without wonder stays inert. You see something, you register it, you walk on. Nothing moves. Wonder without noticing floats free of the world, producing grand questions with no anchor in the real, the observed, the specific.

When my daughter was small, she asked what lights up the moon. Before I could begin the solar-system lecture, she asked whether someone turns it on at night. Another time, quite seriously, she asked if she could grow up to become a galloping horse. When I explained that biology was uncooperative on that front, she frowned and asked, "Why not?"

That is noticing and wonder working together, before schooling and scheduling tidy them away. She saw something. She thought of a different possibility. She asked. Most of us have lost the habit of doing all three in sequence.

The Default Future

Take the apple. The fruit. It had been falling long before Newton. For centuries, it fell, reliably, predictably, in full view of anyone who cared to look. Nobody thought to ask why. The falling was simply what apples did. Newton stopped. He noticed. He wondered. And the future changed direction.

Deepinder Goyal was a consultant at Bain and Company in Delhi. Every lunchtime, colleagues queued up to read paper menus pinned near the cafeteria. The same queue, the same menus, the same ten minutes lost, every single day. Everyone accepted it. Goyal did not. He scanned the menus, put them online, and watched the queue disappear. That became Zomato. No grand vision. No boardroom strategy. A queue and a question.

A sense of wonder breaks the tyranny of the default. It is the difference between a future that is authored and a future that simply arrives, as a mechanical extension of the present.

This is what wonder actually does. It does not simply make life richer or more pleasant. It breaks the tyranny of the default. It is the difference between a future that is authored and a future that simply arrives, as a mechanical extension of the present. When we stop wondering, we stop choosing. We inherit what is already in motion. The apple keeps falling. The queue keeps growing. The menus stay on the notice board.

The most dangerous thing a leader can do is lead a mechanical life. Not because it is unpleasant. Because it guarantees a default future. A different future requires someone willing to find the present strange.

The Condition for Noticing

Which raises the obvious question. If noticing matters this much, how do you do more of it?

The honest answer is not meditation apps or slow mornings, though those are fine. It is simpler and more uncomfortable than that. Stop filling every minute.

We have been trained to treat unoccupied time as a problem, a gap to close, a notification to check, a silence to fill. In doing so, we close precisely the space that noticing requires.

Newton was not being productive under that apple tree. The gardener was not optimising his morning. They were simply present, with nothing more pressing than the world in front of them.

There is something in the Indian sensibility that has always understood this. The capacity to sit without accounting for the time, to let a moment pass without extracting value from it. It is not laziness. It is the condition that noticing requires. The world does not reveal itself to the perpetually occupied.

A former CEO I worked with used to call Wi-Fi, maya. The Sanskrit word for the illusion that veils deeper reality. Whenever the signal dropped, he would sigh that maya wasn't up to scratch today. We laughed, of course. But he wasn't wrong. Invisible, omnipresent, connecting everything, understood by almost nobody. Magic in plain sight, even under fluorescent lighting.

He noticed it because he was the kind of person who left room in his day to find things strange.

Heschel, Newton, and every curious child would probably agree on one thing. The universe does not need you to fix it. It needs you to see it properly.

Take a breath between meetings. Watch the light change on your desk. Be astonished that you are reading this at all.

And if a colleague ever pauses in a corridor, stares at a plant, and asks where it went, don't walk on.