When we become adults, we put away childish things. Sadly and too often, we also lose our curiosity, our ability to learn, joyously, through discovery. To recapture the feeling that comes with discovery of something previously not experienced, you must return to the time when everything was appearing in your world for the first time. Allow yourself to be the child again in your mind.



Although touch is the first sense that a child uses to explore his world, adults have lost, for the most part, the curiosity of touch. Adults use sight more frequently. However, this sense has, too, become dulled through looking without seeing. To strengthen your seeing, pick a starting point. You can begin with objects and move toward events. Or, you can begin with events and work toward objects. Whichever way you begin, reveals much about you. The one you choose to avoid or delay also reveals much about you. We all tend to begin where we are comfortable. Neither correct nor incorrect, just comfortable!

If you ask a group of adults to stand along a railing overlooking some space and ask them to tell you what they see, almost without exception, adults peer into the distance to begin their seeing. They see few specific details that can be accurately described. Colors are muted. Shapes are softened. Lines are seen only on massive things. To some, this seeing reveals the big-picture. Nevertheless, this distance is the most comfortable for adults but it is not the only big-picture.

Move now to the other extreme, something that is within arm's reach. If you are in a familiar environment, you want to see new details. Consciously, you want to record what you see. Look at the colors. If you see red, is it watermelon red, beet red, blood red? Be as precise as possible. Look at the shapes. What do you see that is round, pointed? What geometric shapes do you see? What non-geometric shapes do you see? Look for patterns. Look for what is unusual. See what you have never seen in this familiar object. This close-distance gives you a new big-picture.

Take time to experiment with a range of distances, across the room, across the street. Experiment with a variety of locations and objects. Develop your language of details. How precise can you be? As you experiment more and more, you will experience an emotional bounce when you see something for the first time, most likely with something that you look at regularly without really seeing. Nurture the feeling. It signals that learning is occurring, occurring in the present!

Objects and locations are relatively static. However, one learning by discovery is dynamic, with an entire series of beginnings. Each moment is a new beginning of your experience. This learning relates to events, to processes. Take anything you do and see it in slow, or even stop, motion. Examine every detail to learn what is new to you. Cracking an egg shell. Whipping raw eggs in a bowl. Pouring the eggs into a skillet. Moving the cooking eggs in the skillet to prevent burning. How many different ways did you move or turn the eggs? What parts of this process had you never, or at least not recently, taken the time to see?

Granted, scrambling eggs is not the biggest sight in your life. However, the joy of discovery often times is in the most simple acts. As you practice seeing events in stop-motion, you are really developing a wide range of big-picture skills. In addition, your brain will start to play with the processes by drawing parallels to other events in your life. With practice and experience, you will find yourself dealing with a world of metaphors and similes that help you discover more about yourself and more about your work, your play, your life. These parallels will pop in and out of your brain when you need them to guide you or when you need to help someone else understand. Sorta like Forrest Gump and his box of chocolates to explain life.