Whenever I go out to walk, whether to get somewhere or just to walk around, I usually have my earphones on, listening to music. I feel a lot less anxious about getting where I need to go when I can distract myself with music, which has a way of filling my head and chasing out unpleasant thoughts. After reading an excerpt from Alexandra Horowitz's book on looking, it was time for me to go out and attempt to be more conscious of my surroundings.
I decided to walk around my block because I have lived in this neighborhood for various years, and also before I even lived around here I had visited this area many times, because my mother works close by, and this first school I went to was a couple of neighborhoods over, so once in a while I would walk around the city with my friends after school and we would pass by here. I have walked past these streets so many times that everything is much too familiar for me; because of this, like Horowitz mentioned, I tend to space out the details. My mind says "I've seen this already", and I go on my way with other things on my mind that don't have much to do with my surroundings.
I took notes, as I walked, of everything that caught my attention. One thing I noticed a lot was that on my street and on the first street I turned on, (a street which I usually avoid walking on alone after dark, due to the fact that there are often homeless people on it) had a lot more trash on the floor than I had ever cared to notice. Not bags of trash, simply bags, cans, bottles, etc. randomly strewn about, mostly mixed in with dry leaves. It occurred to me that the strange little back-street I live on and the ominously forgotten-about side street don't often get cleaned by municipal workers. Why would they? There are not many important places on those streets. I then noticed, reaching the Ponce de Leon, a main avenue in the city I live in, that there was suddenly a lot less garbage all over the pavement. This is probably due to the many businesses on the avenue. On the other street that leads down to my street there was also a cleaner sidewalk, but I walk down that one enough to have noticed that it was cleaner simply because people came to clean it up a couple of days before, because it still had fallen tree trunks and things from hurricane Maria.
Another thing I noticed was how many things remain without fixing since the hurricane. It has already been more than half a year, but there are still many things just left the way they are. A fallen metal light post on the Ponce de Leon, pieces of a fallen wooden light post on one of the streets that leads down to my street (even though it was removed to put a new one in it's place, the broken pieces were left on the floor), and even, as I mentioned, one sidewalk was only recently cleaned up, and there are still a couple of tree trunks sliced into pieces but just left there. Even on my street there is still a tree that fell over during Irma, the hurricane that passed a couple of weeks before Maria, just left leaning on the wall that it fell on. It has been so many months since these hurricanes' passing that I had stopped really noticing all the things that have been left unattended. They have just become a regular part of my surroundings. It makes me wonder what some other, less central and less urban, parts of the island may look like today.
All in all, this was a very interesting experience for me. It made me realize how much of my surroundings I take for granted, despite the fact that I usually think I am aware of what is around me. It is amazing how listening to music when I walk usually doesn't only distract my hearing and my thoughts; it also distracts me enough that I do not really see everything. It reminds me of what one of my professors in a human development (in relation to education) class I took said, about how we may think we can focus on various things at once, but in reality the brain is only able to really concentrate on one thing at a time. When we think we are multitasking we are simply switching our focus back and forth, not really attending both things at once. So, when we walk, if we are thinking about things other than our surroundings (as most people do), then there is no way that we are really seeing and paying attention to everything around us.
No comments:
Post a Comment