Wednesday Walk

I got out really early today, when the sky was still blue and it was sub-zero degrees, because I knew the clouds were going to roll in to turn everything grey and horrible. There was also danger of rain, so I wanted to avoid that. It never did rain, but I'm happy I kickstarted the day with my daily 2 hour walk.

Everything was frozen; my local lake, all the puddles on the road, liquid spills, half finished bottles of water, everything. I had to be careful walking too fast as I didn't want to slip and injure myself.

I always find patterns and interesting shapes in everything. Like many people, I do that with clouds where I find shapes and objects in the sky. I think we all do that because we're conditioned to spot faces, to quickly identify friend and foe, so we spot them everywhere. This is why we very often see people in the sky.

I got a few funny looks leaning over frozen puddles taking photos, haha, but I have no shame 😅. So even though I'm a fully grown man, I could be seen studying random mundane things on the floor with a little too much interest, and even taking photos. I bet some people probably thought I was having a mental episode as I even appeared to be talking to myself while doing this. In fact, I was talking to my brother via the nearly invisible earphones that I use.

I've also realised that we all see differently. Given a scene, we all perceive it differently. We all see the obvious, large or well formed object, yes, but we interpret the not-so-clear ones to suit either our pre-programming, or influencing stimuli in the immediate surrounding, such as smells or sounds. It's quite fascinating.

WHAT DO YOU SEE?

Take for example the above image, I've shown it to many people and everyone sees the "child" or "alien" or "person" standing there doing something. The funniest one I got was "an alien doing a wee". 🤣

Very few people saw the "woman doing yoga" or "man doing pushups". Even fewer people formed by the wet patches along the right edge, because they were focusing on the frozen part. Absolutely nobody saw the face formed by the transparent ice. Even I didn't see it while taking the photo. I only noticed it later when looking at it.

I'm sure there are more "people" to discover in this image, hidden in plain sight. It's like the world around us where things are often more than they seem. It's always worth taking a second look at things to see if there's something one missed. We can't always do this, or do it all the time, unless we indeed have some mental health issues or aren't neurotypical. I think I tend slightly towards the OCD side of things, which is why I spot patterns easily and actively seek them out for apparently no reason :)

Peace & Love,

Adé