You go to a new place, a new environment, and every detail pretty much jumps out at you. The tone of the sky. The vehicles you don’t see anywhere else. The energy and pace of life. It stands out as otherworldly. Every new sensation is an invite to ask new questions, occasionally ones you ask out loud.
It’s different. But to everybody else out there, it’s normal.
If you were to approach even the most mundane task with fresh eyes, there’s nothing mundane about it. Take a toddler to a barbershop for the first time for a perfect example. We forget about this when we’re in one place for too long, kind of like how most people don’t recognize the smell of their own house as anything other than neutral.
I love being somewhere I’ve never been, at least partially because it makes me rethink my idea of ordinary. If all these details to me are a novelty, then that’s true in the reverse direction. My ordinary life, the parts I take for granted or think of as unamusing, would be mindblowing from another point of view.
Somebody Else's Ordinary
