January 1, 2021

Unplugging (Even For A Few Minutes)

How much time do you spend looking at your mobile device?

Have you noticed that even when we are walking on the streets, we may have our heads buried on our phones ignoring everything else going on around us?

Arlyna wanted each of us at yaean to be more conscious and aware of things we hardly notice anymore. Inspired by the book The Art of Noticing and #the100dayproject she did in 2020, she gave us exercises on things to notice on our commute to work such as:

    • notice how many signages there are with numbers and whether there is any number that stands out more than others
    • notice how many are wearing non-black winter coats or jackets

On this day, we headed to a small park that is not known to a lot of local residents. The task is to look around the foliage and take notice of the details on leaves, clustering, unique characteristics and more. It was a good exercise to also use our hands in the form of sketches to record the details we found.



And on our walk back to the office, we took notice of the city workers trimming the trees for winter.

Definitely more of this type of activities helps everyone to take a breather and simply stop for a few minutes from looking at our mobile phones.