By Ron Epstein, MD
In her book, On Looking, Alexandra Horowitz describes taking on a challenge to disrupt her habitual ways of seeing the world. Each chapter describes a journey through her Manhattan neighborhood with a person who would present a radically different view of the world, an extraordinary series of journeys through the ordinary. Her first journey started at her apartment with her 19-month-old. Not the usual walk that involved getting somewhere, but a different kind of walk. Toddler in the lead, her challenge was to follow (and of course make sure both she and he survived unharmed). She saw the world differently, not through his eyes, but through her own awakened eyes. Among other things (like what it’s like to relinquish control), he awakens her to isosceles triangles. Who would have thought?
Another walk was with an urban geologist, studying the stones in walkways, bridges, buildings, underfoot and overhead. Then, a walk with a typographer, whose vocabulary of lettering, fonts, typefaces, and artistic adornments rivals a physician’s vocabulary of maladies and an Inuit’s vocabulary of states of weather and water, and whose interest was more in medium than content. Each walk opened a new world, or the same world seen through a different lens. How often do you look at the undersides of leaves to see who has bored through, who has laid her eggs, and signs of fungus and drought? So much more to see if we really look.
A close friend of mine is blind, a result of retinal detachments at age 6. Like the blind companion Horowitz describes, she could feel wind currents and hear echoes of her footsteps enabling her to avoid trees and buildings when navigating a noisy, complex urbanscape. Her visual memory, albeit through a child’s eyes, interacts with her tactile senses, hearing and even smell; she can see, even though her eyes ceased to function decades ago. I remember the first time we met. Leaving a building on a crisp, cloudless winter evening, she commented on the beauty of the stars.
In medical practice, we look a lot, but we don’t always see; we notice what we are trained and habituated to notice. Doctors attend meticulously to physical pain, often blind to emotional distress. While I was doing my dermatology rotation in medical school, I would commute to the hospital by public transport. I found that I no longer saw faces – I only saw zits, moles, and rashes. I became anxious: What would I do if I saw something I was sure was a melanoma? In gaining knowledge, I traded beauty for anxiety.
Today I took a walk through my neighborhood with a Norwegian colleague. The houses and woods, familiar to me, were new to him, and he noticed things I hadn’t even considered. Visits to art museums are now common in medical humanities courses. But you don’t need a museum to learn to see. Take a walk around your own neighborhood with another being, human or otherwise, and ask them (or notice) what they see. Maybe even try that in the healthcare facility where you work. You don’t even need a companion. Sometimes, in a familiar or unfamiliar city, I take time to walk without a destination; when arriving at intersection, choose my direction wherever the “walk/don’t walk” sign directs me. It helps me practice un-expecting and not-knowing.
Seeing is about curiosity, the courage to question the familiarity of the familiar, to consider the known at least partly unexplored. Here, you have an opportunity to be curious about your interior life as well. As you experience a new perspective, what feelings arise? What thoughts? What sensations? Especially when the perspective is different from, even disruptive to, your habitual way of seeing the world.
The novelist, Marcel Proust, an exquisite observer of the human condition, said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Having “new eyes” means that we have choices of how we see the world, its paradises and its Armageddons, and its opportunities for companionship, solidarity, shared mind, action, and, perhaps, peace.