2021-03-08

Huh moments get your attention, close examination gives us understanding.

A fantastic piece on looking more closely by Craig Mod, I would say thinking deeply about things. Acknowledging that everything is more or less complicated, and we need to embrace the ambiguity to navigate the meaning and path forward.

The point being: Looking closely is valuable at every scale. From looking closely at a sentence, a photograph, a building, a government. It scales and it cascades — one cognizant detail begets another and then another. Suddenly you’ve traveled very far from that first little: Huh.

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.

I have read that article closely.