Taking note of tiny things
Also: "Nementia" - Untraceable emotions
It’s fascinating how many things we tune out without realizing.
Part of it’s for our survival, our sanity. Part of it’s ignorance, or laziness, sometimes over-self-absorption.
Sometimes overlooking the tiny details means cheating ourselves out of what makes life worth experiencing in the first place.
Noticing these tiny things is a skill — but when it is acknowledged and shared, special moments happen…
Like how someone on a random discord server had a Connor Price quote as his status line — I told him I liked the song and the artist too, to which he replied he’d had that line up there for several years (close to a decade!) without ever having anyone understanding it, getting the reference, or even commenting on it. My random observation and note made his day.
Or that time when I came across the name “Hank Rearden” placed as a faded-out “name example” in the contact form of a certain website (which has since been updated + changed), which made me do a double-take and then grin. You bet I immediately hunted down a way to message the owner! That led to a lovely conversation on Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, Objectivism, and all those things. That was more than two years ago, and I’m still subscribed to his Substack newsletter.
Or like how a friend mailed me a handmade mug with an imprint on the curve of the handle for your thumb to rest on and stabilize the mug:
Or that time when an email friend noted how I use the colon after the greeting:
I have met someone else who has noticed that punctuating a salutation with a comma makes no sense. And you've acted on the realization.
That was the first time someone had commented on this after a couple years of punctuating email greetings in this way. (And I thought I write more than enough emails!)
But it takes work to remember things, understand their significance (this itself requires understanding timing, context, and substance — just for starters!), and to make sense of all these things together to properly and fully take note of even one tiny detail.
If you don’t know anything about beatboxing, don’t care about this slightly off-beat skill (#seewhatIdidthere), or don’t pay close enough attention to the sounds and rhythms being created, you wouldn’t appreciate WING’s mastery of this skill, the articulation, clarity, and musicality he has developed over years and years of practice (just compare this video with this one).
When I attempt basic beats in the privacy and silence of long and lonely drives, I’m amazed at how so many of his abilities are even possible to create with just one mouth. (And then these two “Rofu," just play with crazy techniques like they’re nothing…) Some things you gotta have to try first before you can understand, before you could appreciate.
It’s easy, then, to feel apathetic towards the tiny things that don’t really matter to “real life” — who else gives a thought on whether it’s a colon or a comma on the “Hi [name]” line as long as the punctuation bit doesn’t change the message?
If we’re not careful, this apathy seeps beyond the things we engage with to the the way we go through life. As the shoe shiner in this fascinating video comments:
In modern times, few people like to spend time tying shoelaces.
I’m guilty of that. I like shoelaces, but often have them left tied just loose enough that my foot slips in and out of the shoe when I want it to, but not so loose the shoe slips off when I don’t.
We do everything we can to minmize doing the mundane stuff so that we could do Important Things that are not cleaning houses or washing dishes.
That often happens when we stop caring enough to care about whatever we’re faced with. I’m taking Visakanv’s words slightly out of context, but I find his insight worth quoting here as we touch briefly on the roots of such apathy:
And- well, I have a lot more to say beyond that – I’d want to talk about relationships, creativity, curiosity… but all of those are details, and details have a way of becoming tedious, irrelevant and even oppressive when the fire in your heart goes out.
Isn’t that so well-put? —That appreciation of details, seeing their connections to the things around them and the “whole” of whatever picture they’re in, and exploring the freedom they lend for your mind and soul to attach themselves more strongly and personally to the thing.
This leads to a semi-confident conclusion: There is nothing too small that we couldn’t learn from, be thankful for, smile over. Even the smallest possible blessings — waking up on a cold winter morning and realizing how hard your blanket had worked throughout the night to keep you warm, for example — can be noted, appreciated, shared.
Even after all this, however, the cynic in me still asks: “What is this all for? Why bother?”
Would people care to know that you’ve hidden shoes in the walls of your workshop?1 Cleaned that one stray watermark on the underside of the faucet?2 Or care to note exactly how a pair of shoes have aged after precisely 20 days of wearing them?3
In Drive My Car (2021) Yusuke loves, knows, and cares for his car as a lover does his beloved. His driver, Misaki, senses and understands it (along with many other things that make this film worth watching).
During one of their conversations, Misaki says this:
“I like that car. I can tell it’s been treated with care, so I also want to drive it with care.”
That, it seems to me, is an instinctive response of those who notice others caring about oft-overlooked details.
And yes, sometimes certain details are unnecessary, unwanted, and even limiting. That’s why over-engineering is a thing, as well as overthinking and over-optimization. Too much detail can indeed render at least some of them“tedious, irrelevant and even oppressive,” fire or no fire in your heart.
Kenya Hara, speaking on Japanese aesthetics, explores two generalized understandings of what “good design” could mean, particularly with chef knives.4 One perspective sees ergonomics as fitting the tool to the user’s hand; the other creates simple knives that allow the user to use it according to their skills and preferences.
When German and Japanese knives are placed side-by-side, you might see the Western tool as having too many details, or the Eastern one as not having enough. It all sorta depends on what you bring with you into the analysis — were you looking for a tool that fits you, or did you coming looking for a single tool that could work with several different skills or use cases?
Thus we arrive back where we started (though made a little wiser and inspired along the way, I hope!). It’s not just that “details matter.” Or to keep yourself learning and openminded so as to open doors for yourself to understand and appreciate the details around you better. It's also not just you acting out the sometimes-trite-sounding adage to “take time to smell the roses and feel the thorns.”5
It’s the magic that happens when the three converge and create a special moment or thought or feeling in you or me.
I’d close with a line I love in Jane Hirshfield’s “The Weighing”:
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
Tiny grains of happiness. They’re beautiful, aren’t they?
Odelia
P.S. I still couldn’t quite include everything I want to say on this topic in this post. I hope to continue this line of thought in a blog post sometime in February — keep half-an-eye open for that, if you liked this one!
Quote for the week
Something that impacted me in some way the past week, and think is worth sharing.
My Symphony
William Henry Channing“To live content with small means.
To seek elegance rather than luxury,
and refinement rather than fashion.
To be worthy not respectable,
and wealthy not rich.
To study hard, think quietly, talk gently,
act frankly, to listen to stars, birds, babes,
and sages with open heart, to bear all cheerfully,
do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In a word, to let the spiritual,
unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common.
This is to be my symphony.”
This week’s word: “Nementia”
Since the start of 2024, I’ve begun a project of writing poems each week using for my prompt an entry from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. I share the best from said project in this section.
nementia
n. the post-distraction effort to recall the reason why you’re feeling particularly anxious or angry or excited, in which you retrace your sequence of thoughts like a kid wandering across the neighborhood gathering the string of a downed kite, which was likely lost in a romantic storm or devoured by that huge carnivorous tree that is Things Your Parents Have Said.
*** Midnight strikes, darkness envelopes The whirring machines around me quiets And yet my mind is not still. A sliver of emotion pokes at my heart Foreign, unanalyzed, paralyzing - I try to remember why it's here. ***
Snapshots of life
Photos taken of things I’ve made or worked with, or places I’ve been the past week.
Not taken this week (it’s my first Friday off in a while!) but I clean this particular floor weekly:
Give this a peek
This song made my eyes mist over. Partly because he’s holding back tears of his own as he sings this one. Here’s “Jude’s Song,” by the way. :)
Bullet notes from my desk
My family got a milking cow yesterday. Haven’t decided on the name yet. She’s lovely, and my mom says she “looks gentle.” That remains to be seen. Perhaps I shall come back with pictures next week. :)
Have you noticed how easily people in conversation adopt and adapt to each other’s communication styles, sometimes even content? Mirroring without meaning to — even to the sort of pictures we share with each other. (I’m looking at you, Snapchat buddy.) It builds rapport whether it’s consciously or subconsciously applied into a given scenario.
AI and watches: Never realized how attractive and dominating 10:10 is, at least on the web! I’ve always liked 5:45 or 7:15 because they remind me of handguns…
Over the past three months I’d been preparing for a 3-week trip to Egypt. It’s been a dream of mine for almost 20 years, so having it cancelled nine days before the departure date was sort of a big deal. I keep telling myself not to let it get me down; so far I’m going along strong with normal life, but the emotions of confusion and disappointment are messing with my head whenever I’m not busy-busy. I know healing from situations like this take time and patience. I guess it’s just been a long time since I’ve felt this way (different from the rage from two weeks ago, haha — what is my life now, a sitcom? XP). So, question for y’all: How do you deal with unexpected disappointments?
A shout-out to a writing competition that looks lovely: the Limnisa short story competition 2025, from Greece! Currently working on my submission. :)
On a happier note: I begin a four-semester program at a local college this week, studying architectural technology. I’m now two days in, and already considering an extension of the program to a three-year journey (along with two co-op programs). But maybe that would be a bit much, considering other dreams and plans for exploration + further learning after (or during!) this program. Guess we’d have to see! Come February, the plan is to also enrol at a fine arts school to put together a portfolio for potential applications for further studying — a process that, given my current skills, would probably take close to two years. (Matching my current program. :)
I’m very much still wondering how far to pursue this direction — do I want to be an architect just because it sounds cool; is the current program I’m taking enough to get me doing what I actually want to be doing; and, maybe more importantly, what exactly do I want to design and build, and are those projects worth pursuing?
All that to say, I have more questions than I do answers. But I won’t lie — I prefer to live this way. ;)
I discovered Ken and Khish the Work almost two weeks ago. I feel an infatuation developing within me the more I engage with his content and thoughts — but over the shoes, or the workshop/lifestyle depicted, or the man himself, I can’t determine quite yet. You may see more of him in future posts. Just saying. ;)
Yes, that’s the IG account for my cleaning biz. Much of the fun of having it up in the first place is naming the whole endeavor after the cringy “very thoughtful, very mindful, very demure” TikTok trend from a couple months back. (How’s that for an irrelevant detail of an insignificant backstory of a little-known cleaning business that isn’t known to more than 30 people (prior to this post, hahaha)?)
See? I said you’d see more of him in my posts. XP
I can’t get over this scene in Eat Drink Man Woman (1994). That wall of knives is so satisfying.
I took the liberty of editing in a bit of my own thoughts there…I think that’s a perfectly cromulent thing to do, maybe. I often hear only the first part quoted, and it’s such a shame to not acknowledge the yin with the yang.