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“Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw — actually saw — a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century; there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs. We need habit to get through a day, to get to work, to feed our children. But habit is dangerous, too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic. The eye sees something — gray-brown bark, say, fissured into a broad, vertical plates — and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I really take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles, and I think Shauna. But did I take the time to see my wife? …The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles becomes unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack.”
–Anthony Doerr, Four Seasons in Rome
