500 Words a Week - Familiarity
Familiarity can quietly lead to a slow decline, a gradual detachment from life. Our relationships begin to crumble, not just with others, but also with the places we inhabit. We stop asking questions because we think we already know everything. We stop exploring the small streets around us. We stop noticing the tree that stands outside our home, forgetting how it changes through the seasons. We dismiss it as just the same old tree, just as we sometimes may neglect the people around us, assuming we already know what’s going on within them. Familiarity can breed complacency, causing us to take the world and the people closest to us for granted.
The same pattern plays out in our routines. It isn’t the routines themselves that create the problem, but the relationship we develop with them, the presence we bring to each moment. Over time, we slip into autopilot, moving through the day lost in the far-off recesses of our mind. We no longer experience our lives, we simply move through them.
Familiarity with our work can cause a quiet disconnect too. A slow monotony creeps in when we are faced with the same tasks and challenges day after day. We lose sight of the process, and with it, the joy that can be found in simply immersing ourselves in the work. We forget that deep satisfaction is often not found in the end result, but in the effort and the learning that comes from the doing itself.
This slow drift, this loss of presence, seeps into other areas of our life as well. We find ourselves spending more and more time lost within our own minds, growing increasingly distant from the experiences and relationships around us. Familiarity can come to feel like a cage, trapping us in a version of Groundhog Day, repeating the same day over and over. Yet it’s not the routines that trap us, it’s how we relate to them. It’s the way we see them. Our interaction with the familiar determines whether our lives deepen and expand, or whether they begin to feel dull and disconnected.
The antidote to the trap of familiarity isn’t to chase novel experiences, but to look upon our world with novel eyes. It is to notice the new within the old, to seek out what has always been there but has gone unnoticed. It is to approach the people around us with a renewed, expansive curiosity, rather than assuming we already know them.
This brings to mind the idea of awe that the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke spoke of. Today, awe is often reserved for the grand and the vast, towering mountains, roaring waterfalls, endless horizons. But awe can be found in the ordinary, too, if we are willing to see it. It can be found in the look shared between two kindred spirits, in the first taste of coffee in the morning, in the soft golden light of a late summer evening.
We all have access to these moments of awe. We have simply allowed ourselves to become too familiar with them, looking past them without really seeing. As you move through your day, can you look toward the familiar with fresh eyes, free from the haze that routine often casts? Can you remain open enough to experience awe, even in the places and people you think you know by heart?
