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My stomach gurgles. A floorboard creaks. Somewhere outside, a skateboarder rumbles down our street, echoes cycling between polyurethane wheels and seven-ply maple deck, then booming into the night. An iron gate opens and lightly clangs closed — is it ours or a neighbor’s? The light over our kitchen island flickers, so fast it’s hard to recall if it happened at all. In the bathroom, the head of an electric toothbrush has been knocked to the floor, and a eucalyptus leaf, from the branches we deck around our shower nozzle every winter, is lying near the bathtub drain. I breathe in, and I notice a slight tickle in my left lung, maybe the beginning of a chest cold, maybe a speck of dust, maybe a post-melanoma node an X-ray will detect next year, maybe — I hope — just my imagination.

Once upon a time, I would have missed all of these things. This was a long time ago; let’s say four decades ago. I used to be oblivious. I ambled through life unaware of much of what was going on around me — with my family, my friends, the world writ both large and small. I was a kid, this was normal, right? Children are solipsists by nature, driven by needs and desires they don’t even realize are selfish.

Until, eventually, they do. They grow up a little. This doesn’t mean they stop being selfish, just that they recognize that their needs and desires exist in a realm of many people’s needs and desires, of situations and experiences that happen outside of their knowledge. And they begin to understand that there is something valuable to be gleaned from their surroundings, an advantage to be taken, a veiled logic to operate within. Making sense of the world makes a new kind of sense.

I don’t know if most people develop this way quickly or gradually, but for me it happened more or less in an instant. Alas, I have to be vague here, because I’ve forgotten the specific event that brought about this change. I would like to say that it had something to do with my friends. Either I hurt a friend’s feelings, or a friend’s feelings were hurt badly by someone else and I witnessed the fallout, or perhaps a group of my friends were in on some joke I failed to understand. How old was I — 10, 11, 12? What I do remember is this: I was oblivious! All around me, I suddenly saw, things were happening that I had missed, while everyone else had picked up on them. Were these subtleties I’d need to squint to perceive, or sirens blaring so loud they’d become part of an indiscriminate background? I didn’t know. And I was embarrassed not to know. I felt laughed at, looked-down upon. I was sad. I felt like a goddamn child.

So I swore, right then and there, to observe absolutely everything around me, from the yellowing and fluttering leaves of late autumn to the errant hairs on the lip of a convenience-store clerk, in the hope that maybe, if I could accumulate enough detail, my world would begin to make the kind of sense it seemed to for everyone I knew.

And, uh, it hasn’t quite worked out that way.

More after the ad…

Look, I’m no super-spy. I was never trained by the CIA to catalog the people in a room or the locations of exits; my gadgets are off-the-shelf and three generations behind; I can pick only the simplest locks; I hardly ever use reflective surfaces to observe strangers unnoticed.

Instead, I’m self-taught. I trained myself to look at everything… by looking at everything. Right now, for example: green desk lamp, two pairs of light winter gloves, a phone cable I’m not using and need to stuff into a drawer, an empty teacup, a Jules Verne–themed Lego sculpture, a Yeti microphone, a geometric wooden coaster, an old Alessi watch with a dead battery, someone else’s hairclip, a tube of Celsius rehydration powder, a container of Therapy Putty…

I would never try to remember any of these details — to install them in an elaborate memory palace. Even 40 years ago, I knew things like this were meaningless. But I clocked them, labeled them anyway. It was enough to linger for a millisecond on anything I saw, heard, felt, tasted, and smelled, to turn it over in my brain and ponder what it might tell me of the tableau in which it found itself, before I discarded it and moved on. I read closely. I listened. I noted every street sign, gauged the angle of the sun. No one ever quizzed me. No one, as far as I knew, knew I was doing this. So I kept on doing it. I observed the world, registered its elements, then observed the world some more.

Paying close attention is not a bad thing to be able to do! It certainly made high school easier. Teachers would speak, textbooks would dictate, and just by giving them an extra sliver of focus, I could absorb knowledge without a struggle. And I really do mean “absorb” — I didn’t struggle first to understand what was being taught, then remember the material. Instead, I accepted it. I told myself I understood it, or would understand it later, and made the information a part of myself. Usually, this worked out. It was only high school, after all.

Even afterwards, though, my approach proved useful. Observation and acceptance, acceptance and observation — I feel like they’ve allowed me to face the world, in all its wonder and awfulness, without ego or judgment. (Okay, okay, with “slightly less” ego and judgment.) I can eat anything, go anywhere, meet anyone, and enjoy the entire experience because I focus not on whether it’s “good” or “bad” — that is, how it relates to my own needs and desires — but on what the experience is: the tiny details that make it real. If you want to be a travel writer, or really any kind of writer, observation and acceptance are key skills to develop.

But they’re not enough. And that’s the part that has fucked me up all along. For one, no matter how hard I’ve tried not to miss anything, I still miss things! All the time! I overlook big obvious facts dancing right in front of my face and subtle signs that everyone but me picks up on — and I do this I think because I still mostly live inside my own head, entertained by my own thoughts and distracted by the way they wander. I sit at the computer, I read books and watch movies, I talk to my wife and the kids, and I communicate with my friends mostly through the screens of my computer and my phone. The world beyond lies… beyond, right outside my windows. I can see it, catalog its objects and its denizens, but it all feels almost fictional — raw material that I’m somehow supposed to assemble into meaning.

And so that’s the other limitation of my approach: I don’t know that it works. Because for as long as I’ve been trying to observe everything, I’ve also remained aware that I understand little to nothing. I had hoped, I continue to hope, that I would see enough and learn enough that this agglomeration of notes and details would one day collapse under its own incalculable mass and fuse, sun-like, into a self-regenerating engine of comprehension. But nope! Instead, I’ve wound up with an infinite tangle of esoteric computer cables. I can recognize each one of them, but don’t know what I’d plug them into, or why I’d want to, or what I’d do with the connected mechanism once it’s done. I only know that it often seems like other people know, that they’ve sussed out the inner workings of this world without needing my catalog-it-all strategy. Meanwhile, I feel like I’m still playing catch-up, a middle-schooler chuckling at the older teens’ antics and wondering when they’ll clue me in to their mysteries. Remind me, how long do I have to fake it before I can make it?

One thing I do understand: I am often wrong about a lot of things, including this. Maybe no one gets it. Maybe we all — including you, {{first_name|dear reader}} — have trouble making sense of anything outside our own heads, and those of us who do appear to have it all together are secretly still confused, just pattern-matching their way through life, approximating comprehension to a superb degree and awaiting the microsecond when the ineffable truth, just one stupid ineffable truth, will be revealed. I hope that moment comes for you, just as I hope it comes for me, but until then I will be waiting, and watching, and paying very close attention. 🪨🪨🪨

Spy shows are awesome, particularly those that strip off the glamour of James Bond and reveal the dry and maddening machinations behind coups, murders, blackmail, and politics. The Sandbaggers, which ran on ITV in the UK for three seasons, from 1978 to 1980, follows a squad of elite special-ops agents from London to Gibraltar, Morocco, Finland, and beyond, facing bullets abroad and bureaucracy at home. It’s all wonderfully downbeat, yet intense and emotional as well. And it’s now on Amazon Prime, well-restored and as crisp as a Windsor knot. Watch it!