The Power of Noticing

BY REBECCA BAYUK

Rebecca Bayuk is an editor, writer and classic movies fan who is partial to poetry, animals, and kitchen discos (she continues to extend an open invitation to her two cats, despite their distinct lack of enthusiasm). She is originally from Brontë country in Yorkshire, England, but now lives with her husband just outside Washington DC. You can find her over at rebeccabayuk.com, or pootling around Instagram: @rebeccabayuk.

In Rear Window, it’s a broken leg that does it.

Photographer L.B. Jeffries, accustomed to life on the road in exotic locales, finds himself confined to his apartment, thigh-high in plaster and thoroughly miserable, one sweltering New York summer.

Rewatching Hitchcock’s classic recently, I’m struck by how keenly I identify with Jeffries, played by James Stewart—and not just because of our mutual irritability and penchant for natty men’s pajamas. 

While all my limbs are mercifully intact, I know just how Stewart’s character feels. 

Both our worlds have shrunk. 

First came freelancing, largely from home; then a global pandemic, and leaving the house only to walk outside an hour a day. The scope of the world narrowed to the breadth of a picture window.

Like Jeffries, I found the transition difficult. Suddenly, and without warning, this was all there was. 

I hardly need to describe how hours in lockdown bloat and swell into distended, nightmarish versions of themselves; I’m sure you remember. Perhaps you still feel that disorienting sense of time slipping loosely through your fingers like ribbons: perhaps you too, like me, like Jeffries, find little to motivate you, feel quite paralyzed by—well—everything. 

Forced to abandon his usual frenetic routine, fastened firmly by way of plaster-cast in one place, Jeffries finds some solace in observing his neighbors. And working from home, at my desk under a large window on the top floor of our narrow rented townhouse, I begin to do the same.

From here I can see the row of houses opposite ours, the trees, bristling with birds, which flank them on one side, our neighbors’ balconies below. And, as Jeffries comes to know the hitherto unnoticed rhythms of his neighbors’ lives, so too do I. There’s the older man living at number 7, who dons an oversized novelty hat each time he leaves the house: a giant, bug-eyed clownfish, a neon jester’s cap; one with a dangling dragon’s tail covered in scales. Then there’s the cluster of children who gambol out of number 3 each afternoon, whooping and howling like wolf pups as they circle the parking spaces on foot or bike. There’s the scrubs-clad nurse at number 11, returning from the night shift, whose days end as mine begin, who climbs wearily from an SUV as I settle into my chair, coffee in hand. My favorite: the father of high-school-aged kids (themselves continually on their way to or from various sports practices) who emerges each morning to walk sedately around the block with a small pug on a leash. Man and pug both are bleary-eyed yet stately, magnificent. The pug sports a variety of outfits; his owner prefers plaid pajamas and pool shoes. 

In Rear Window, Jeffries’ observations intensify when he witnesses a marital argument, after which, rather ominously, the wife disappears. While I’ve yet to solve any murders (though I joke I’d be an excellent eyewitness, so familiar have I become with the rhythms of my neighborhood) I have, like Stewart’s character, discovered how life-changing the act of simply noticing can be.

I begin to pay attention consciously,  to really notice what’s around me—not only in terms of what I can see, but also what I can hear, feel, or taste. And I find that beneath my initial assumption that ordinary equates to monotony, or even lack—this is all there is—there lies instead a teeming of tiny moments of beauty and joy. 

There’s wonder in watching your neighbor’s magnolia unfurl waxy-white petals, a peace which comes with tracing the path of a single browning leaf as it tumbles lazily through the air; a giddy, childlike joy in spotting squirrels scramble over patio-furniture obstacle courses, a poignancy to the pajama-and-pool-shoe-clad father daily waving off his growing high-schoolers. I stop checking my emails as I drink my morning coffee. Instead, I sit and savor the taste, and I look at the sky.

There’s a reassuring quality to these rhythms of everyday life, which until now I’ve never fully appreciated. Too busy, I suppose, looking elsewhere for excitement, for validation. Jeffries longed for his adventurous, risky life on the road; I long, increasingly, for answers to huge, terrifying questions: what will happen with climate change? What about war, or Covid mutations, or the fact the Amazon is on fire, again? Thrumming underneath such existential anxiety is the hum-drum, mundane kind I feel guilty about continuing to experience: why someone didn’t text back, how the wrinkles around my eyes only deepen, how I am older and yet no closer, it seems, to having control over much of anything. Still, the sun rises, my neighbor shuffles out in his rainbow-colored hat to collect the newspaper, the crows gather around the garbage cans on collection days. The magnolia blooms. The finches make their nests and line them with feathers. Things keep persisting, stubbornly.

Though most of Rear Window is concerned with the darker side of human nature Jeffries observes through his camera lens, in the final scene we are left with no doubt that noticing, and all that followed, brought our protagonist happier realizations, too. In this scene, Jeffries sits contentedly beside his impossibly glamorous girlfriend, played by Grace Kelly. Their on-again, off-again relationship— a product of Jeffries’ suspicion of commitment, of his endless yearning for elsewhere— is now on a firmer footing; Kelly’s character brandishes a book titled Beyond the High Himalayas— a sign, we assume, that she’ll soon be joining her beau on his expeditions— while Jeffries is relaxed enough to fall asleep. 

This, for me, is the most powerful change noticing brings. As we notice, we see that much of what makes up our lives is fairly ordinary—but no less wondrous, meaningful, or, indeed, extraordinary, for it. Very often, we have Grace Kelly right under our nose—in the form of a person, a moment in nature, a sensory experience, an appreciation of the simplest of things—but it takes stopping to notice to allow us to see.