Hello, you divine magic 8 ball of best possible outcomes.
Happy mid-week or almost the weekend.
Are you exercising your curiosity muscles? Now that we’re picking our heads up from our phones and really engaging with the world around us, I have some fun “game” ideas.
Try building a collection.
Not like a baseball cards or little frog figurines, just things to guide your journeys of curiosity.
Mark has a mental map of every owl he has ever spotted. He also has a few jars of unique feathers.
Tara and her husband have a competition every year as to who can find the most money on the ground. They keep their stashes separate. After New Year’s Day brunch, they bust out the spoils of the past year and set about to counting. Winner takes all and gets bragging rights for a year.
Victoria keeps a keen eye out for unintentional heart shapes in the wild: leaves, puddles, rocks, even fallen scrunchies. She documents with photographs.
I have an actual collection of earrings I’ve found on the ground. It’s grown to at least 150 pieces and includes non-earrings such as two possible wedding bands (which I tried to reunite with their owners) and some bracelets.
I’ve lost count of the number of phones and credit cards I’ve come upon. It’s really kind of a drag because the responsibility to get them to their owner is heavy and time-consuming.
The other phenomenon I find frequently is faces. In everything from tree bark to cars. This is an official thing and I’m not the only one. Once it starts happening, it’s with you for life. I find it weird that this isn’t more ubiquitous.
More of a game and less of a collection, Molly plays a game when she lives in a city with underground transportation. Each member of their train party chooses a prompt, ie: socks and sandals, shirt with rhinestones, rainbow motif, etc. As soon as they spot anyone bearing one of the prompts, the whole lot gets off at the very next stop to explore the neighborhood.
Rob Walker has an amazing newsletter called The Art of Noticing and a 2019 book by the same name. The goal this project is to increase your awareness of your surroundings not as a tactical exercise, but a tactile one. Incorporating the ideas Walker presents has changed the way I view my world, include how I look at house numbers, and well, almost anything in my neighborhood.
Other ideas:
Cartography of puddles in your neighborhood.
Can you name all of the kinds of trees growing around you?
Actually name the trees you walk past most frequently? Not their scientific name, just a way to address them. Bid them good day and comment about the weather. Ask them how they feel about being peed on by neighborhood dogs or people stapling yard sale or lost dog signs in their bark.
Go color searching, and try to locate all of the blue objects.
Invent a form of divination based on the stress cracks and repairs in roads.
Try to find the oldest thing you can.