Broaden and Soften Your Gaze

This is the first part of a four-part series exploring ordinary sensory perceptions.

I led a slow-looking workshop at the Columbus Museum of Art last weekend.¹ I love devising attention exercises tailored to various contexts and reminding participants that they can practice mindfulness with their eyes open.

One challenge we often face when looking at art is the pressure to figure out, appreciate, or critique something that’s hanging on a museum wall. It can be intimidating. People often feel hesitant about sharing their observations, which can hinder open discussions, even when the topic is primarily visual perception. I do my best to encourage them to try to suspend the impulse to interpret what the works mean and instead focus directly on their ability to see what’s right in front of them. 

The arts can surprise, delight, and move us. Ideally, we want them to confuse or unsettle us, prompting us to pay attention differently sometimes. They give us a break from our personal story problems, allowing us to consider other perspectives. They get into our hearts and psyches through our eyes and ears.

As Robert Olen Butler says in The Alleys of Eden, “Every art cuts away whole areas of human experience to focus your attention on a selected few elements. Then you can see those elements as you never have before. Painting cuts away sound and words so you can see better, music cuts away words and vision so you can hear better.” 

We kicked off the workshop by walking back and forth across the museum lawn at a normal pace, then gradually slowed down our steps until they felt a bit wobbly. It was the perfect opportunity for me to share my usual disclaimer² about mindfulness practice: switching out of autopilot mode can be destabilizing, but it allows us to notice details we often overlook.

Lingering for several minutes in front of a few different paintings feels socially awkward at first, even in a museum. Still, ordinary details become surprisingly fascinating when we invest a little more attention in them than we usually do.

When participants spend just a few additional minutes engaging with a painting, the insights they share are often more powerful than any abstract-sounding ideas a mindfulness coach might suggest. It’s remarkable how spending just a little more time can make a significant impact, revealing that cultivating mindful awareness is much more experiential than conceptual.

Here are some of the observations they shared at the end of last week’s session.

It’s unusual to make time for slowing down long enough to really see what’s in front of us. There’s too much competition from content designed to entertain or outrage. You have to make the time, and it’s just so much easier not to.

The pull to shape what we see into narratives is strong. We have to try to stay with light, color, and form. We want to make sense, understand, and solve, but we can also steer back to the raw visual data. Noticing the difference and temporarily forgoing the story can be surprisingly satisfying.

It’s important to ask yourself, more often than never, what is worthy of your attention. It’s also helpful to consider what’s at risk when you leave this question for others to decide on your behalf.

It’s cliché to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but there tends to be a lot of wisdom lurking in most clichés. David Hockney says, “It’s the very process of looking at something that makes it beautiful.”

Mindful awareness exercises invite us to test such claims with our own eyes, without rushing to prove or dismiss them. They help us achieve what visual artists hope for: that their work inspires us to notice what is hidden in plain sight around us once we leave the museum.

Exercise

This exercise sharpens your ability to see what's right in front of you.

Circumstances for learning this attention exercise

• Going for a walk

• Waiting in line

• Stealing five or ten minutes to reset before or after driving³