Here’s what you notice when you pay attention:  the boot cleaning brush mounted at the entrance to the convenience store in the country.  The one that’s not there at the doors in town by the university.  You notice that most people here wear boots, or at lease closed-toe shoes.  No flip flops in the snow (yes, you’ve seen this).  This is the kind of place that sells fudge, fried chicken, and motor oil.  This is the kind of place you only ever stop by, on your way someplace else.  Maybe, on a nice weekend, you might linger over the nearly-extinct candies of your youth.

When you spy the boot cleaning brush do you consider using it, trying it out?  Like tourists playing at the pillory in Colonial Williamsburg?  Do you know what it’s for or do you have to stop and think for a minute?  Do you wonder at the lives of the people here or do you think you already know?

What we think we know usually gets us in trouble.  It makes us scared in the wrong neighborhoods.  It makes us cliquish in the right ones.  What we think we know obstructs truly knowing.

You must admit that you have absolutely no idea who these people are and why they need to clean their boots at the gas station.  When you look, you see Hollywood stereotypes from poorly written films.  You see that you don’t see at all – that behind that brush is a community and you simply aren’t part of it.

You resolve to try more humility and less know-it-all-ness.  You resolve to pay attention in town, at the university, to try seeing the markers of those communities the way you saw that brush.  Is it the flip flops?  The crowds of solo people, each staring into their own screens in the coffee shops?  Restaurants that remodel with an electrical outlet next to every table?

When you pay attention, you notice that you haven’t been paying attention.  You have existed on auto-pilot without realizing it, floating along on a buffer of assumptions that are supposed to make your life easier.  But you don’t really want it to be easy, do you?

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photo credit:  “A country boot brush,” © 2009 Stanley Howe, CC BY-SA 2.0.