Having eyes, they don’t see.
People look without seeing, hear without listening, eat without taste, touch without feeling, and talk without thinking. — Leonardo da Vinci
This quote is widely attributed to da Vinci but in the 3 seconds I searched I couldn’t find where it actually came from. Anyway, I feel like it’s a rehash of many other quotes I’ve heard. One notable one that comes to mind at the moment is a quote that I believe I heard in high school but now can’t seem to find with my relatively weak GoogleFu. A monk is visiting New York for the first time and the Westerners showing him around expect him to be very impressed. They show him Times Square and take him to Macy’s and after a few hours he turns to his escorts and says, “It’s so strange. With so much wonderment all around them, all anyone in this city can seem to do is to look at the ground 3 feet in front of them.” In fact, one of my wife’s favorite teachers in high school (who’s blog is currently on hiatus) would purposely attempt to watch the ground rather than look around because he thought that it was the people who were looking around that were instantly marked as tourists and easy prey for sales pitches and pick pockets.
It has always been my personal goal to have this not be true of me. I desperately don’t want to drift through life eating and drinking, laughing and scratching, sleeping. I want to deeply engage with the time I have here. I’ll tell you how I did when God gives me my grade…
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