Notice the beauty that algorithms overlook

Like so many of you, I am tired in a way that sleep can­not fix. I am tired of the dai­ly news cycle out­rage, the relent­less uncer­tain­ty of a world that is increas­ing­ly unaf­ford­able and slow­ly warm­ing toward its own extinc­tion. I won­der if peo­ple are los­ing their basic good­ness, wor­ry about what kind of world I am leav­ing to my child. 

Yet I keep func­tion­ing as if none of this is hap­pen­ing. I work. Pay bills. Make din­ner. Remember birth­days. Call my mom. Try some­how to remain a rea­son­able, emo­tion­al­ly reg­u­lat­ed per­son while the world los­es its mind. 

When I teach yoga, I often cue my stu­dents into a shape with their bod­ies and then encour­age them to notice. Notice the breath, the sen­sa­tion of a mus­cle stretch­ing, your mind wan­der­ing away from the moment, I might say. Notice the sound of the rain out­side. Notice if you feel frus­trat­ed right now. Notice this, notice that. 

Notice what you notice. 

Increasingly, we are being trained to notice, but only that which some algo­rithm deems impor­tant. Fear cap­tures our atten­tion. Anger keeps us scrolling. Outrage trav­els faster than qui­et acts of decen­cy. The algo­rithm does not par­tic­u­lar­ly care whether we feel peace­ful, informed, or emo­tion­al­ly exhaust­ed. It only cares that we keep looking. 

So we look, absorb­ing anoth­er cat­a­stro­phe, anoth­er act of cru­el­ty, anoth­er rea­son to wor­ry. And slow­ly, almost imper­cep­ti­bly, the world begins to look like noth­ing but the very worst things hap­pen­ing in it. 

But that is not the whole sto­ry. While we have been watch­ing the ter­ri­ble things, life has con­tin­ued to pro­duce an aston­ish­ing num­ber of beau­ti­ful ones. But we must notice them. 

Right now, on an ear­ly Sunday morn­ing, I sit typ­ing by the win­dow as the sun ris­es. As I notice what I notice, I see the hill­side has begun to turn gold and rust, and the mist is still gath­ered in the low places between the ridges. The pink light has caught the trees just right, set­ting the edges of their leaves on fire. A hawk cir­cles above the har­vest­ed field in the valley. 

And for one qui­et moment, sit­ting here beneath that enor­mous Kentucky sky, I remem­ber that the world is not only what we are doing to it. It is also what we are still lov­ing, still tend­ing, still try­ing to save. 

This moment won’t trend or pro­duce spec­tac­u­lar footage. Yet it is the con­nec­tive tis­sue of human life, the notic­ing. The creek still runs, the birds still argue in the trees, and some­where beneath the noise of our human anx­i­eties, the nat­ur­al world is car­ry­ing on its ancient, extra­or­di­nary busi­ness of becoming. 

This is not an argu­ment for ignor­ing suf­fer­ing. There are real injus­tices to con­front, real dan­gers to address, real peo­ple who need us to pay atten­tion and act. Gratitude must nev­er become an excuse for com­pla­cen­cy, and notic­ing beau­ty does not absolve us of our respon­si­bil­i­ty to repair what is broken. 

But despair is not the same thing as wis­dom. Exhaustion is not the same thing as engage­ment. And pay­ing atten­tion to every­thing that is wrong is not the only way to prove that we care. For we can­not build a bet­ter world if our imag­i­na­tions have become so sat­u­rat­ed with its fail­ures that we can no longer pic­ture potential. 

We do not need to pre­tend that the dark­ness isn’t there. We just need to remem­ber that dark­ness is not all there is. 

Look around you, right now. Notice what you notice.