What if the thing catching your attention doesn’t have to explain itself yet?
Maybe something already started moving there.
A few days ago we went to visit friends in Asheville, North Carolina.
Their house sits up in the mountains. You walk out to the deck and all you see is forest — green on green, and behind it the blue ridges at sunset. During the day, bears come out from between the trees. The mother first, her cubs behind her.
A place where everything happens without anyone organizing it.
One afternoon, in all that green, my eyes landed on a branch where the leaves had turned a different color.
I wasn’t looking for it. It had been there, catching my eye since the day before.
And the next day, leaning on the railing, I turned my head and there was another one. A different branch. The sun coming through it just right.
I don’t know if it had been there all along. It probably had.
The forest didn’t change. Where I was looking did.
In psychology, this is called selective attention,
a field researchers like Anne Treisman helped map out: out of everything in front of us, we only take in a fraction — and which fraction changes depending on the state we’re in when we arrive.
We don’t see what’s there. We see what we’re available to see in that moment.
In everyday life, it’s simpler than that.
One day the same street you always walk has a door you never noticed. A conversation you’ve had a hundred times sounds different. A line you read years ago suddenly says something.
The street didn’t change. The line didn’t change.
You did. And that’s why you let yourself see it.
And here’s something I’ve been noticing for a while now: some connections don’t come around twice.
What calls you today won’t call you the same way tomorrow. The branch that stopped me yesterday was a different one today. If I don’t look when it shows up, it doesn’t show up that way again.
For a long time I wanted to understand right away what everything meant. I demanded meaning immediately. And when I couldn’t find it, I dismissed it.
These days I do something simpler: I’m grateful it showed up.
That it appeared at all. Without asking it to explain anything yet.
Because sometimes you’re going through something without knowing you’re going through it. And the first thing that arrives isn’t the answer.
It’s the sign that you’re paying attention.
Life isn’t here to be understood. It’s here to be lived. And how you choose to live it, minute by minute, is what changes it.
I’m Saskia Fulco.
And this space is for exactly that — so you can stop demanding immediate meaning from what shows up, and start noticing that you’re already seeing differently.
No pressure. At your own pace.
If you want to keep going from here, I wrote a short digital book for this: Begin With I Am, a practice for coming back to yourself and recognizing where you’re looking from. You can download it in the ebooks section.
For today, just one question:
What’s been catching your attention lately, without you knowing why yet?