Most of us go through life looking at things without really looking at them. That isn’t criticism; it’s probably the only way we can get through the day. If you had to examine every doorknob before opening the door, study the engineering of your coffee cup before taking a drink, and investigate every car you passed on the way to the grocery store, you’d never get much done. Once we know what something is and it works well enough for whatever we’re doing, we tend to quit looking at it.
Take a chair. You see one and recognize it as a chair, and that ordinarily settles the matter. You don’t examine the angle of the legs, wonder why the seat is that particular distance from the floor, study the joints holding the back together, or ask why the damned thing doesn’t collapse when Uncle Fred leans back on two legs after everybody at the table has told him not to. You already know chairs. Unless this particular chair does something unusual, there isn’t much reason to give it another thought.
That little bit of efficiency is useful, but I have begun to wonder how many potentially interesting things it causes us not to see.
Every once in a while, something interferes with the familiar. Maybe it’s something completely new, but it can just as easily be something you’ve seen a thousand times that suddenly behaves differently. Whatever causes it, you stop for a second and think, Well, I sure ain’t seen THAT before.
I have become rather fond of that moment.
The Shopping Cart With the Bad Wheel
Suppose you’re pushing a shopping cart through the grocery store and one of the front wheels starts going clunk, clunk, clunk. You have probably encountered this before, and the traditional solution is to become irritated and continue pushing the damned thing around the store. You know what a shopping cart is, you know what a bad wheel is, and neither one deserves much examination.
But suppose this time you look down.
Why does one wheel seem to go bad before the others? Why does it seem so often to be one of the little swiveling wheels at the front? How is the thing attached? What allows it to swivel? What gets bent, worn, dirty, or stuck? Is that same kind of wheel used on hospital equipment, factory carts, luggage, office chairs, or something sitting out in your garage?
I haven’t the faintest idea whether examining that shopping-cart wheel would produce anything useful. That’s not really the point. The important thing is that for a few moments you stopped seeing shopping cart and started seeing the pieces from which somebody made one.
Once you do that, an ordinary object becomes considerably less ordinary.
Look at the Parts You Usually Ignore
We do the same thing with things much larger than shopping carts. Consider a restaurant. Once we call it a restaurant, we have conveniently wrapped hundreds of separate things inside one word. There is a kitchen, menu, employees, customers, tables, chairs, prices, lighting, smells, parking, suppliers, refrigerators, trash cans, bathrooms, cash registers, signs and a delivery truck that invariably arrives at the least convenient moment. Somebody had to decide how every one of those pieces worked, and somebody else has probably found a different way of doing most of them.
The same is true of almost everything around us. A telephone, a business, a baseball game, a school, a website and a toaster all become familiar wholes once we know what they are. Familiarity makes life easier because we don’t have to rediscover the toaster every morning. Unfortunately, it can also hide the pieces.
So one of the things I have started doing is trying to look where I ordinarily wouldn’t bother looking. I don’t begin by asking how I could improve something or what wonderful new invention I could create from it. That puts too much pressure on the poor shopping cart. I just look at the part I normally ignore and see whether anything about it catches my attention.
Sometimes absolutely nothing does. The wheel remains a wheel, breakfast remains breakfast, and the toaster continues doing whatever mysterious electrical business toasters do.
That’s perfectly all right.
The objective isn’t to manufacture an idea. It’s to give one a chance to happen.
Where the Hell Did the Idea Come From?
That question is how this website came about.
I’m Kirk Ward, and I’ve accumulated eighty-four years’ worth of jobs, businesses, successes, failures, mistakes, people, machines, places, questions and assorted junk. Somewhere along the way I became interested in where my ideas had actually come from. Some had seemed to arrive almost fully formed, and I had always been perfectly willing to take credit for them. It is one of the privileges of being the fellow standing there when an idea shows up.
When I began going back through the experiences that preceded some of those ideas, though, the story became more interesting. Things I had learned in one place sometimes seemed to turn up years later in something completely different. An experience I hadn’t thought about for decades could suddenly become interesting again when something new gave me a reason to remember it. I began wondering whether ideas really arrive from nowhere or whether something we encounter today sometimes bumps into something we’ve been carrying around for years.
I don’t claim to have settled that question. In fact, part of the reason for building The Old Gits Website is that my life gives us only one old git’s worth of evidence. That’s a pretty small sample, even if the old git has been collecting junk for eighty-four years.
That’s where you come in.
Tell Us What You Saw
You don’t need to bring us an invention. You don’t need a theory, a business plan or the answer to some great unsolved problem. You don’t even need to know why the thing you noticed interested you.
Maybe something happened at work that didn’t make sense. Maybe your grandchild did something that reminded you of something your father used to do. Maybe you noticed a peculiar piece on a machine you’ve operated for twenty years and suddenly wondered why it was there. Maybe you saw a news story, heard a phrase, watched somebody solve an ordinary problem in an unusual way, or simply found yourself staring at something and thinking, Well, I sure ain’t seen THAT before.
That’s enough.
The Your Ideas section of this website is where you can tell us about it. We’ll publish some of those encounters so other people can look at them too. If your observation reminds somebody else of something apparently unrelated, I want to know about that as well. I may have encountered something that bumps into it. One of the artificial-intelligence systems I work with may find a relationship worth examining. We may go looking for research to find out whether somebody else has already figured the whole damned thing out.
Some of those excursions will probably lead nowhere. Others may lead to the Discoveries section of this site, where we’ll keep the interesting things we find when stories, questions, memories, research and other people’s experiences begin bumping into one another.
I don’t know what will come out of that, which is rather the point.
For now, try something ridiculously simple. The next time you encounter something completely familiar, don’t just look at the thing. Pick out a piece of it you normally wouldn’t bother noticing and have a look at that instead. You don’t have to solve anything. You don’t even have to understand what you’re looking at.
Just give yourself the opportunity to say:
Well, I sure ain’t seen THAT before.