As I was leaving the cafe this morning I noticed the man sitting behind my wife was tapping his leg excessively. He was having a casual business discussion with another man who had an array of documents and paperwork in front of him.

The leg-thumper was wearing running shorts and his frantic tapping was pushing his phone up and out of his pockets revealing to me a familiar red, square button that signals your phone to stop recording.

I realized that the man in shorts was secretly recording their conversation without the other man's knowledge. His tapping leg was the physical representation of the nervousness he was trying to hide.

I wondered, "Why is he recording this conversation?", "What were contained in those documents?", and "Why is this guy wearing running shorts to this meeting?"

Then my thoughts turned to the death of privacy. How these days you can never be sure that somebody isn't recording what you're saying or filming what you're doing without your consent. Even worse, people are incentivized to catch you in the act of slipping up because it might afford them a minute of fame on the internet if the act is scandalous enough.

As I walked home with my wife, we discussed what little bits and pieces we overheard the two men saying, mostly big words and fluffy statements signifying nothing. We joked about how much of the world is filled with people talking bullshit with bullshitters.

It was interesting to me that all of these thoughts and conversations we spurred on by a small observation about a man tapping his leg a little too frantically.

When I got home I wrote all if this down in my journal.

The writer David Sedaris said, "Keeping a diary teaches you what you're interested in."

What you write in your notebook is a record of your observations–a log of what you found interesting enough to write down.

Before I started journaling I was aptly labeled "unobservant" which was factually true. I rarely noticed anything around me and took little interest in my surroundings. I was probably too busy looking at my phone most of them time to even notice.

But the practice of journaling has taught me to be observant and how to take notice of the world. It's a way of attending to the curiosities and absurdities that surround me, invisible until I choose to open my eyes. And when you open your eyes, things get interesting.

No tree has identical branches, no dog has the same personality, and no human shares the same life story. If you look at anything long enough you'll see it's unlike anything else and yet we go about life acting as if everything is the same old thing we saw yesterday.

I've found the more I observe and write about those observations, the more interesting life becomes. It humbles me and reminds me that I know next to nothing and that there is always more to the mystery than I initially expected.

Journaling about my observations pushes me to look "at usual things with unusual eyes" as the poster on my wall reminds me.

The great writer E.B. White once said, "when a man quits writing in his journal...he has lost interest in life."

It's also true that when someone starts writing in their journal it means they've taken an interest in life.

Prompt:

Write down three observations from the day. What did you find interesting about them?