One of the things I say often in my work is “We need a fresh set of eyes.” I remember a poster at my first job that had those words written in large print with a pair of glaring eyeballs. As a graphic designer — then and now — it meant having somebody else look at your work before it went to press, because you’d been staring at it for so long you were not going see the typos and other mistakes.
I was thinking about “fresh set of eyes” just this week. My friend Alyssa, age 6, was visiting, and we were looking through one of my old journals filled with collage, paintings, and cut-out pieces of paper. She was curious and asking lots of questions.
TBH, I was curious too!
On those pages were teabag fobs and candy bar wrappers, stamps and quotes, and all of the things that I was seeing with fresh eyes — back then, as an artist new to collage and mixed media. It made me think a lot about what I see now versus what I was seeing back then.
I remember learning about fonts and typefaces when I first got into graphic design back in the late 80s. It was so exciting! Everywhere I looked, I was seeing fonts — the Helveticas and Times New Romans, the Zapf Chanceries and Couriers. I remember paying a lot of attention to those for a long time.
It was the same thing with the collage journals. I was seeing what I was learning, seeing the possibilities of ephemera all around. It’s the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon — when you start to notice something more often because you’re aware of it. More simply, it’s paying attention. That was the mantra of my former mentor Dale Carlson: PAY ATTENTION! It was, for her, synonymous with meditation.
It was that same attention PAY ATTENTION that I remember clearly when I started walking in the woods. Everything was new: the sites, the sounds, the smells! I wanted to have names for the trees and the flowers and those weird white stalks clustered in the middle of the forest (Indian Ghost Pipe)!
I would take photos. Get down on my hands and knees to examine leaves and petals. I learned plant ID and Latin names. Studied tree barks. Learned bird calls by sound and mnemonics.
It was that attention, that observation and consideration, that became the foundation of my blog writing and my first book: LOOK UP! Musings on the Nature of Mindfulness. Mindfulness or awareness, maybe even mediation, that’s what we’re talking about right?
Paying attention. Being mindful. Being present!
I know I’m not the only one who can say I’m not nearly as mindful or present as I was when I was writing LOOK UP! Smartphones and social media were just babies back then. We were all riding high on the hope of the Obama presidency, and Climate Change was something we still could change. Life was good. Oh sure, there were distractions. And it wasn’t completely idyllic. But it certainly wasn’t the chaotic, attention-depleting, disappointing world that we live in now.
But here’s the interesting thing…when I settle down into something that demands my attention, something that needs me to be fully present, like answering the myriad questions of my friend Alyssa or writing this essay, when I engaged in these things that require my attention and my focus, all of the external chaos fades away.
It’s like that science experiment where soap parts the pepper and water. Attention parts chaos.
I know some folks who can sit quietly in meditation, who can do the deep breathing and the pushing away of thoughts. That’s not me. And I’ve struggled with that for more than 20 years! But Dale was the first person to explain to me that there are many ways to meditate. This is what she says in her book Stop the Pain: Adult Mediations:
“If you like to read, begin your journey into stillness with reading, Krishnamurti or the Bible, Buddhist teachings, the Hindu Gita, the prose of W.E.B. Du Bois, Chief Seattle, a Walt Whitman poem, the Tao. If your nervous system is the result of an active gene pool or you are personally too frayed to sit down right off, begin with a walk, yoga or other stretch postures, a bike ride, gardening, a swim, or learn one of the attentive arts, kung fu, taekwondo, tai chi, Sufi dancing.”
For me, anything that stops the busy brain, anything that disconnects me momentarily from this chaotic world we’re living in, that’s meditation, that’s being present with yourself for a little while. And we all need that!
So what are the ways that you reconnect with yourself? What are the ways that you disconnect from all of the things swirling around you?
Essay ©2026 Jen Payne.
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