March 22
One has to do something new in order to see something new.
Waste Books
Listening mode
One has to do something new in order to see something new.
Some things about yourself you only learn when your usual means fail you. If you speak a foreign language you have only half mastered, you may notice how often you otherwise sidestep with irony. Now you lack the words for it. You say things more plainly than you mean to, and sound a little strange to yourself.
You would hardly have found this by thinking alone. After all, this habit is what you were thinking with. It only shows itself once it stops working.
Still, this kind of seeing is hard to order up. If you take up something new only to learn something about yourself, you easily remain a spectator of your own attempt. You then pay more attention to the hoped-for insight than to the thing itself. Yet the unexpected needs precisely those moments when the unfamiliar occupies you completely.
And it is not always welcome. What you see often has nothing to do with the new, but with the old you return to. The next day you are speaking your own language again. The irony is there at once, and this time you notice it.
