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Staying Long Enough to Notice

What familiarity reveals after novelty has worn off.

Everyone talks about the romance of arriving somewhere new. I am more interested in what happens when you stop arriving and simply live somewhere.

The once-exciting bakery becomes the place where you buy bread on Saturday. You know the shortcut. You stop photographing things. Then the city begins to speak in a different register.

Boredom is underrated as a perceptual state. It begins when you have absorbed the obvious things and your attention is free to drift toward the subtle ones.

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