Seeing with new eyes

One day after returning from a trip,  as I went through a turnstile on my way to the train to go home from work, it was weird realizing that I’ll go weeks or months going through multiple turn-styles nearly every day, and then I’ll go on a vacation and possibly not go through a single one.

Sometimes when I return to Chicago, these and revolving doors seem to be novelties again. This is a nice feeling to be actually noticing the things around me rather than just running through life unthinking. There are so many revolving doors in Chicago, whereas I don’t see them nearly as often when I’m traveling (except possibly in NYC). It would be hard to see them more often than I normally do at home; on a normal weekday in Chicago, I go through revolving doors at least 8 times and turnstiles at least 6 times. I had to think about it to come up with numbers as I don’t hardly notice anymore how often this is.

This reminds me of a family in Peru. When I was at the airport, there was an escalator going up to the check-in area. I hadn’t seen one for a while but hadn’t considered how scary it could be to someone, particularly a child, not used to them. At the bottom of the escalator was a family with two small children. The children were clearly terrified of the escalator and no amount of cajoling was going to get them on it. Finally, the parents picked them up and got on the escalator with them. There can be a fine line between novelty and terror, keeping kids (and at least one adult I’ve met) off escalators and keeping me from sky diving and bungee jumping.

Somewhere else I saw a similar scene, but once the kids rode the escalator holding their parents’ hands they were enamored of it and went up and down them in circles. Luckily there weren’t a lot of people around so they could have this newfound joy. It’s a shame that as adults, joy like this can be harder to find.

To some, escalators and even bungee jumping and sky diving are so mundane that you no longer count them. When you pay attention, you can realize how novel these things used to be. It’s all just what you are used to. And what you were brave enough to do the first time, with or without encouraging parents, that became normal.