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Hey Reader,

A really, really good tomato is worth the wait and the effort and, sometimes, the travelling. It’s why my greenhouse is full of tomato plants of different varieties. I’m excited about all of them, but particularly the Wlàdecks, which is a heritage tomato. Big, beefy, and red. The kind of tomato you see in old-timey children’s books, perhaps drawn by Beatrix Potter.

A client sent me some seeds a few years ago, and I planted them. Then I gave some baby plants to my neighbour, and she’s saved the seeds every year — and every year she gives a couple of plants back to me. That one tomatoey gift has kept on giving.

And it’s a really fucking good tomato. The kind of tomato that explodes sugar and umami and summer into your mouth as you bite into it. The kind of tomato that reminds you of holidays on Greek islands where everything tastes so much more vivid. The kind of tomato that reminds you of your childhood, when you’d stand in the humid, tomato-scented heat under the glass and pick a sun-warmed monster from your Grandad’s greenhouse and eat it right there, amazed that it’s possible to grow something so delicious.

Even the tastiest shop-bought tomatoes pale in comparison to those you grow yourself. It’s much more convenient to go to the supermarket. Much more efficient.

Much more sterile.

Inefficiency, I’ve realised, is where life happens. It’s where we notice things. It’s where we remember we’re alive.

I’m a writer; I already knew that. But it’s easy to forget it when we’re constantly bombarded with ways to make everything more efficient.

And sometimes that’s a good thing! I don’t want to spend any more time than I absolutely have to dealing with admin or working in my inbox or faffing with folders. There’s all sorts we can and should automate.

But what are we losing along the way?

One of the things we’re losing is eagerness. The other is attention.

I’ve never found it difficult to be interested in everything. What I’ve been finding increasingly tough, though, is the eagerness. Partly, I think, because the world is a bin fire. Partly because of new “innovations” in social media to keep us constantly distracted form the world. But also because forced adulthood and modernity seems designed to suck the enthusiasm out of everything.

How many times have you seen someone mocked for being too earnest or excited? Or it’s suggested that adults have “more important things to do” than mess around? Or learn something new for the sake of learning it? Or just going for a wander for no particular reason?

When we do those things, we notice new stuff. We see, rather than simply looking. We listen, rather than hearing. We notice what matters to us instead of just wading through what life throws at us.

There’s value in attention (why do you think social media companies are so staggeringly, obscenely rich?). Executives put a monetary value on our attention every single day, and extract as much of that value from us as possible every second.

What might happen if you clawed some of that attention back and claimed it for yourself?

Rachel Carson, marine biologist and founder of the modern environmental movement, paid close and obsessive and, frankly, heroic attention to the deliberately obscured and deadly side-effects of pesticides. Things changed.

The Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806 provided data we still use today. Lewis and Clark trekked across the Pacific Northwest taking meticulous observations and notes about all the flora and fauna they encountered. That data is crucial in understanding environmental changes today.

Toshiyuki Nakagaki and Atsushi Tero noticed that single-celled organisms without a nervous system exhibited “intelligence” in certain behaviours. That attention to detail and nerdy fascination led to a study which involved Physarum polycephalum, a brainless slime mould, solving mazes to find food. It was rooted in the field of biological computation, and earned the team an Ig Nobel Prize in Cognitive Science in 2008.

Michaelangelo was obsessed with creating the most life-like sculptures the world had ever seen. Which meant he wasn’t content with simply noticing the outside of a human body; he knew that to capture the kind of movement and poise that brings a statue to life, he needed to understand how bodies fit together on the inside. How the bones and muscles work to move each body part. So he dissected many, many corpses to figure it out.

What do you pay attention to? Why? How does it show up in your work? Could you direct your attention elsewhere to do better work?

It’s not all about the work

All that is well and good, of course, but what about just being inefficient for fun?

Kurt Vonnegut, in his later years, told his wife he was going out to buy an envelope.

Vonnegut probably wrote a bunch of stories and essays just from that one short trip to buy an envelope.

What are you missing when you order online? What’s passing you by when you plug your ears in and scroll your phone on the Tube or the bus? What might you see, hear, experience if you took yourself on a Noticing Things Date once a week?

We’re here on this Earth to fart around, yes; but it’s more than that. Farting around — playing, paying attention, noticing things — is how we find the juiciest tomatoes, the unexpectedly intelligent brainless slime mould, and the human connections that make life worth living.

Here’s a suggestion: grab a notebook and make it your Noticing Things Journal. Make it small so you can take it everywhere. Make it physical and solid, so you need a pen or pencil to use it. Then, every time you notice something that makes you go “huh” or “ooooooooh” or “weeeeeeeeeee” write it down.

You’ll notice more and more. You’ll have more and more ideas. You’ll experience more and more delight.

You’re welcome.

TTFN,

Vicky 🫡

p.s. Some further reading: The Art of Noticing by Rob Walker. The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Tiny Experiments by Anne-Marie Le Cunff

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