19: The Spiritual Practice of Noticing
Has September already started moving faster than you hoped?
The routines are back. Your calendar is filling up. Days pass quickly, and before you know it, you realize you’ve been moving through life on autopilot.
If you’ve been feeling distracted, wondering where your days are going, or finding it difficult to notice God in the middle of ordinary life, this episode might feel familiar.
In this episode, I talk about why we often miss what’s right in front of us—and why that may be shaping more of our lives than we realize.
In this episode, we explore:
why nearly half the people in one famous psychology experiment missed something impossible to ignore
what one conversation between Jesus and a blind man reveals about the way we move through everyday life
one simple question to carry with you as September unfolds
If September already feels like it’s slipping by, I hope this conversation helps you slow down long enough to notice what matters most.
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I’m Denisa Nica, and welcome to Walking Anyway. You’re listening to episode 19.
This is a podcast about living faithfully in uncertain seasons when life feels unclear and nothing is quite settling yet. If you’re not quite sure how to move through this in a way that feels steady and true, you’re in the right place to keep walking anyway. Each week I offer a reflection and a gentle way to help you live faithfully, one ordinary step at a time.
I’m an author and spiritual director, and the founder of The Table— an online contemplative community shaped by a weekly rhythm, where women practice this kind of faithful living together, at their own pace, in the middle of their real lives and faith.
I live in Spain, where life moves a little slower, and that has changed the way I pay attention, and the way I live inside my own life.
Today, I want us to think about attention. Not the kind that helps us get more done, but the kind that slowly changes the way we live—and the way we love. Listen in.
It’s September 1999.
We’re in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Inside the Psychology Department at Harvard University, two researchers—Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris—are about to publish a study that will become one of the most well-known experiments in modern psychology.
The experiment couldn’t have been simpler.
A group of volunteers is invited into a room and asked to watch a short video. The instructions are straightforward.
“Count how many times the players wearing white shirts pass the basketball.”
That’s it. No trick questions, no hidden agenda, just count the passes. So they do. They watch carefully. They concentrate. They count every pass. And when the video ends, the researchers ask a question no one is expecting. “Did you see the gorilla?”
“The gorilla?”
Right in the middle of the video, while everyone is carefully counting basketball passes, a person wearing a full gorilla suit walks into the frame, stops in the middle of the players, turns toward the camera, beats their chest, and calmly walks away.
Nearly half the people watching never see it. Not because they aren’t paying attention. Because they are.
The study is eventually published under the wonderfully understated title Gorillas in Our Midst, and more than twenty-five years later, psychologists still point to it as one of the clearest demonstrations of something called inattentional blindness—our surprising tendency to miss something obvious because our attention is fixed somewhere else.
Some ideas stay with you. I don’t remember exactly whether I first came across this experiment while reading about attention or later, when I picked up The Invisible Gorilla, the book Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons wrote after the study. I honestly can’t remember which came first.
What I do remember is how fascinated I was. And how unexpectedly unsettled. The psychology fascinated me, but that’s not why it stuck with me - I realized I wasn’t only reading about attention, I was reading about myself.
I suppose that’s always a possibility when you pick up a psychology book. It began to feel more like a mirror. A mirror that was showing me something true about what it means to be human.
And, more personally, something true about the way I move through my own life. I’ve always assumed that if something important happened right in front of me, I’d notice. As it turns out, that’s not always the case.
Ever since then, the question that remained with me was: “How many things have I simply walked past because my attention was somewhere else?”
Or maybe an even better question is this: “How many things have been there all along…while I was looking in another direction?”
I wonder if that’s true in more places than a psychology lab.
I think it might be just as true in ordinary life. Think about an ordinary Wednesday. You make your coffee before the house is fully awake. You answer a text from your daughter, then remember you still haven’t replied to your sister. You remind yourself to call your mum later, just to see how she’s doing. You remember there’s something you need to talk about with your husband, but neither of you has found the right moment yet. You think you’ll do your strength workout this morning, then move it to the afternoon. Before you know it, you’ve moved it to the evening.
And at one point in the middle of all this, you realize it’s already noon.
On your way home, you remember you’re almost out of olive oil, so you stop at the supermarket. You unpack the groceries, fold the washing that’s been sitting in the basket since yesterday, answer one last email, and before you know it, the light outside has already begun to change.
Most days don’t feel important while we’re living them. Nothing remarkable happened. And yet… I wonder how much happened that we never really noticed.
Not because we don’t care, just that our attention was already spoken for.
One of my favourite poets, T.S. Elliot, wrote a series of poems called Choruses from The Rock. In one of his poems, he asks a question I just can’t shake. “Where is the Life we have lost in living?”
He’s not saying that life disappears, he simply confronts us with an important question - is it possible to move through our days so occupied with living them that we somehow miss Life itself?
And at some point, that same question reaches our faith. Is it possible we do the very same thing with God?
One story comes to mind.
Jesus is leaving Jericho. The road is crowded. People are walking with Him, talking over one another, trying to keep up.
Sitting by the side of the road is a blind man named Bartimaeus. He hears that Jesus is passing by, so he begins to shout. “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!”
Many people rebuke him and tell him to be quiet. But Bartimaeus cries out all the more. “Son of David, have mercy on me!”
Then Mark gives us a sentence so short you could almost read past it.
Jesus stopped. I can’t seem to get past those two words. Jesus stopped. The crowd keeps moving. Jesus doesn’t. Instead, he says something unexpected. “Call him.”
Now, Jesus could have walked over to Bartimaeus Himself. But he’s not, he’s asking the very people who had just tried to silence him, to call him.
And suddenly their words change. A moment ago they were saying to Bartimeus “Be quiet.” Now they’re saying, “Take heart. Get up. He’s calling you.”
I’ve been wondering if that’s one of the quiet ways Jesus forms us.
Without even realizing, little by little, we stop walking past the things Jesus stops for.
The Christian tradition has an old Greek word for moments like these. It’s the word kairos. We usually think of time as something that can be measured by minutes, hours, and days. In Greek, that’s chronos. But kairos speaks about a different kind of time. It’s an appointed moment. A fitting moment. A moment when God meets us with an invitation and asks for our response.
The moment itself may look completely ordinary.
You might be washing the dishes, walking the dog, reading a familiar passage of Scripture, sharing coffee with a friend, or pausing because the light coming through the trees catches your attention. Nothing has changed on the outside. But you begin to recognize that this moment is asking something of you.
It may be an invitation to forgive. Or to trust God with something you’ve been holding tightly. You may begin to see someone differently. Or realize you’ve been telling yourself a story that is no longer true. Or perhaps you simply receive the ordinary beauty that has been there all along.
You can’t manufacture a kairos moment. It’s always God’s gift.
What we can do is learn to live with the kind of attention that recognizes one when it comes.
Perhaps that’s why I keep coming back to the practice of noticing. I don’t want to keep walking past the things Jesus stops for.
So where do we begin?
The good news is that this isn’t something we master overnight. And it isn’t another spiritual discipline to squeeze into an already full day.
It begins much more simply than that.
Tomorrow morning, before the day gathers speed, pause for just a moment. Before you reach for your phone, or before your mind starts counting everything that needs your attention.
And simply carry one gentle question with you: “Could God be inviting me to notice something today?
You don’t need to force an answer or wait for something dramatic to happen. Just carry the question with you as you move through your day.
Most days will probably feel exactly as they always do. But every now and then, you’ll find yourself lingering a little longer in a conversation. Or noticing that your body is more tired than you’ve been willing to admit, and that rest isn’t something to earn but something to receive.
Perhaps a familiar passage of Scripture meets you in a way it never has before. Or a small moment of beauty catches your attention when you would normally have hurried past.
What if attention is one of the ways love grows?
The more present we become to God…to ourselves… and to the people around us… he more room love has to take root.
It turns out the most important things in life aren’t usually hidden. They’re often waiting quietly in plain sight while our attention is somewhere else. And yes, little by little, we learn to stop walking past the things Jesus stops for.
Remember the Harvard experiment? The instructions were simple. Count the basketball passes. That’s all the volunteers were asked to do.
And because their attention was fixed on counting, nearly half of them never saw the gorilla standing in plain sight.
It turns out we’re all counting something. Deadlines. Notifications. Groceries. The conversation we still need to have. The worries we carry from one day to the next. What we choose to count shapes what we’re able to see.
And sometimes, while we’re busy counting everything that demands our attention, we miss what has been quietly there all along. But slowly, as we learn the way of Jesus, our attention begins to change. We stop walking past the things He stops for. So tomorrow morning, before your mind begins counting everything that needs to happen…pause.
Look again. You never know what might be waiting in plain sight.
Thanks for listening to episode 19 of Walking Anyway.
As you make your way through the rest of September—and all the ordinary demands that come with it—I hope you’ll remember that the life of faith is, in many ways, a lifelong education in attention. Little by little, as we learn to notice God’s invitations in ordinary life, we discover that faithfulness often looks like responding to what’s right in front of us. And perhaps that’s how love grows: one moment of attention at a time.
If there’s one thing I hope you’ll carry with you from today’s conversation, it’s this: paying attention is a practice. And like any practice, it grows by returning to it again and again.
That’s why I write on Substack each week.
Rather than offering more information to consume, each reflection is an invitation to slow down, pay attention, and keep noticing God’s presence in the ordinary days you’re already living. It’s a simple way to keep practicing what we began together in this episode.
If you’d like to continue the conversation this week, I’d love to have you join me there. You can find me by searching for Denisa O. Nica on Substack, and I’ll leave a direct link in the show notes.
Because the way you’re walking through this, is already forming something steady in you.
If this episode encouraged you today, would you do me three small favors? First, follow Walking Anyway wherever you listen to podcasts so you don’t miss next week’s conversation.
Second, if you’ve been enjoying the podcast, leaving a quick review is one of the most meaningful ways you can help other people find it. And finally, if someone came to mind while you were listening, send them this episode today. You never know how one conversation might become exactly what someone else needs.
Thank you for being here. I’m so grateful we’re walking this road together.
As always, you can find me at denisaonica.com., on Substack at denisaonica.substack.com or on Instagram at denisa.o.nica. I’d love to see you there.
As you step back into your day, notice what stayed with you, and let that be enough for today. And just like light moving through a room— you don’t need to see everything at once to keep living faithfully here.
Before we close, the next time you find yourself busy counting the basketball passes of everyday life, I hope you’ll remember these words from Simone Weil: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
Thanks for listening, I'll be here with you next time.