Reflection about On Looking by Alexandra Horowitz

I really enjoyed reading Alexandra Horowitz’s essay "Amateur Eyes" because I agree with what she says. We are often so busy in life that we don’t pay attention to what is happening around us. Horowitz mentions that “Attention simply making a selection among all the stimuli bombarding you at any moment”. I agree with this because in life we always have things to do, distractions surround us, and it can be hard to try to ignore everything that is happening to just focus on a single thing. Since she is speaking from her experience walking through New York I can just imagine how many things she has been missing because New York is such a busy city. One thing that surprised me is that after she observed the city on her walked she mentioned that she felt she missed everything, that she was not paying close attention, “We see, but we do not see: we use our eyes, but our gaze glancing, frivolously considering its object. We see the signs, but not their meanings. We are not blinded, but we have blinders.”

I feel that when we go through a certain spot for a long time it starts to lose its interesting characteristics that once intrigued us. For example, by living in Puerto Rico I am so used to living five minutes away from the beach and visiting it all the time that when family comes to visit, it surprises me when they are in awe with it. I feel that sometimes we need something or someone else to make us see what was in front of us all the time. This is what Horowitz did in her book when she chose to walk around with different people who had another perspective of the world.
Another thing that resonated with me in the reading was when Horowitz said, “The world is wildly distracting.” She goes on to mention that when we are quiet, maybe thinking or analyzing something and someone asks us “What’s up?” we tend to answer “Nothing much” instead of saying what we’re thinking. I liked this example that she gave because I feel that sometimes we have a lot of things in our mind that might be overwhelming us and instead of trying to communicate it, we usually try to disguise it. I know she was talking about it in the sense of not sharing what is distracting of the world, but I think it can apply to other aspects in our life.

Horowitz finishes by saying that “These walks re-awakened in me a sense of perpetual wonder in my surroundings --a perceptual skill typically available only to experts and to the very young not yet expert in being people). Perhaps they will awaken wonder in you, too.”  I loved this because we should all try to go outside and see the world with different eyes. Try to explore and see what has been in front of us all this time yet we were too distracted to see it. I think this can also help when we’re feeling bored or in a very monotone world, maybe if we chose to see things differently they could spark something in us that wasn’t there before. I realize that I should go through life trying to view things from different perspectives and seeing things with new eyes in order to discover things that maybe I didn’t notice before.