Did You See the Unicycling Clown?

Going back in time to start noticing again

In 2009, researchers conducted a study whose centerpiece was a clown riding a unicycle.

The researchers planted the unicycling clown in the middle of a busy thoroughfare on a college campus. Then they asked a few hundred people who had walked past the clown if they noticed anything unusual.

Participants fell into four groups: walking while talking on a cell phone¹, walking while listening to an MP3 player², walking without any electronics, or walking with one other person.

Take a wild fucking guess which group barely noticed the unicycling clown³.

8% of cellphone talkers spontaneously recalled the clown. When researchers explicitly asked them Did you see a clown???, only 25% said yes. The number was ~50-75% for those in the other groups.

Paying attention is hard. It was hard in 2009 and it’s only gotten harder over the last 15 years. When I woke up on November 6th, I realized how much of my time and attention I’d given away to clicking on and scrolling through whatever was put in front of me. I’d let so many people who for sure do not give a shit about my well-being determine what I was reading, thinking, and feeling.

I’d given myself over to websites that make money by getting my attention and keeping it. The longer I look, the richer they get. And the way to get people to look longer? Upset them.⁴

So I stopped. To my utter surprise, I just stopped.⁵

Wanna know what happens when you stop clicking and scrolling mindlessly? You discover how much time and attention you really have. You start paying attention to what you want to pay attention to.

And guess what—you can do that right this minute, using Kim Addonizio’s Three Observations exercise⁶, also from 2009!

I simply say to myself: Three things. Look around, observe three things that are striking or unusual, and note them…Odd signs, bumper stickers, strange behavior—note anything unusual or just plain vivid.

The point of this exercise is not to make lists of observations and then turn them into poems. You don’t even need to write down your three observations, though I think they’ll keep better if you do. The point is to notice.

…Training our awareness is important, not only for writing, but for experiencing life moment to moment.

In the last few weeks, I noticed a wall I drive by regularly is half-covered in ivy. I noticed a tree in the forest that’s red on top, yellow in the middle, green on the bottom. I noticed that a pen I thought was kinda basic actually slides nicely across the page.

I double dog dare you to do this exercise right now. What are three things you notice in your environment? For extra credit, move past the three big-ticket or obvious things and notice something you’ve never noticed before.

Especially as we age, we notice the same things—our eye falls on the same book on the bookshelf, the object that is out of place, the flaw in the mirror. But there is so much more to see. All we need to do is exert a bit of energy to get over the hump of our habits, into new territory where the world can surprise us.

As Mary Oliver wrote, “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about It.”

I would love to hear what you’re noticing—put your three things in the comments. And read on for more on 2009 and what I’m noticing.

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Here’s another thing that happened in 2009: I purchased a digital camera that I still own and recently started using again.

I took it to the North Carolina State Fair, where I set out not to take good pictures, but simply to notice what I noticed and see what I could capture with the lens in my hand.

I noticed the people.

I noticed color, symmetry, and contrast.

I noticed light and dark.

As I do every year at the fair, I ate fried Oreos, cooed over the piglets, and admired the giant pumpkins. But it landed a little differently, thanks to all that noticing.

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I also brought my digi to Denver, where two things blew me away. The first was real-ass snow I hadn’t seen since my Midwest days. I took approximately one hundred pictures of snow because I could. Because it was beautiful and noticing it from many angles was a way of appreciating its beauty.

The second astonisher was Time Park⁷, a parking lot I walked past every day and constructed a whole story around.

In Time Park, you can stop, stretch, and slow time⁸. After you park there, you can spend a week hiking the Alps or an hour having tea with the Queen. You can have a nap in a blacked out hotel room and when you wake up, it’s the same time as it was when you fell asleep. You just walk off the lot and into a portal that’s part time machine, part Narnia closet. Time Park: Park your worries for the day and live the life you dream of.

This, of course, is what the noticing does—allows us to create our own stories rather than being pulled into and driven by others’.

Friends, I hope you notice the shit out of this broken, gorgeous world and you tell the hell out of it.

1. Phones used to be for real-time voice communication. It was kinda great.

2. Google it.

3. Laypeople, you can read more details in the NYT piece. Scientists, you can log in and read the study itself here.

4. For more on this, read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus, which will make you want to burn all your devices, move into a mushroom house, and converse only with fairies via facial expression.

5. Things I stopped looking at: The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian. Things I stopped doing: the Fibble, the Contexto.

I changed my home page to the Academy of American Poets, where every day a new poem is posted, which I read a few times over the course of the day. It makes me feel a thousand times more human and alive than any of the activities/sources I abandoned.

Some of you may be thinking that turning away from news is using my privilege to insulate myself from hurt. Audre Lorde famously said “Self-care is an act of political warfare.” Suffering and hand-wringing isn’t the same thing as resistance. Making art and feeling joy are.

6. From her book Ordinary Genius: A Guide For the Poet Within. I do not write much poetry, but these exercises are phenomenal for anybody who likes to string words together.

7. It’s possible that it’s called Park Time, but obviously it’s Time Park.

8. FYI time is fake.