By interlibrary loan from the Twin Falls Public Library I
obtained and read a delightful little 2022 book by Miranda Keeling titled The Year
I Stopped to Notice. It could have been subtitled The Joy of Noticing Little Things
- which are what can make a speech memorable. That book has 177 pages and is just 4-7/8’
wide by 6-1/2” high. There is a Google Books preview through page 32. Her introduction
begins:
“You might be reading this because the cover looked cheerful,
or you’re frantically searching for a present for a friend. You might just be
marking time in a shop because it’s raining outside and you don’t want to leave
yet. Whichever way you found yourself here, hello.
It’s the small moments, like the one you’re having right
now, that make up this book: a woman in a shop opens a book and reads the
introduction. Perhaps she is wearing a yellow dress. Her brown hair is curly.
It is swept up with a silver clip in the shape of a shark. It is chilly in the
shop, and she places the book down to take a knitted green cardigan out of her
bag and put it on. The wool is thin at her right elbow. Perhaps a man reads
this page. He sits at his laptop in a café, looking at the book online. He has
dark red hair. His hands on the keyboard are freckled. He is avoiding work.
Underneath the café table a small elderly dog sleeps across the man’s foot –
the dog makes short whining noises at something in its dream, Perhaps one of
these people is you. Perhaps you are completely different.
Days can feel long, and years fast. Our lives are full, yet
at the end of the day when someone asks us what we did, we can barely remember.
This book is the result of me stopping to notice the details and finding that
ordinary life is extraordinary in its own way. If you’re someone who can find
the big picture a little overwhelming and need moments of peace in the storm,
or who loves the busy, layered fabric of life and just wants some of it
captured to enjoy over coffee, read on.
Everywhere I go, I record what I notice: snippets of
conversation, images, an atmosphere. I have been captivated by the everyday
since I was very small. I grew up in Yorkshire, the Netherlands, America, and
London. As my mum and I walked around these places, she would often interrupt a
sentence to say: ‘Did you see that?’ I loved the times it turned out that we
had spotted the same, small thing. At art college I studied glassmaking. I made
miniature sculptures – if you looked closely at them, you could see worlds of
colour inside. I carried a notebook everywhere, Then, about seven years ago, I
began writing them down instead. Not everything I see is lovely. I live in the
world. But that is not what this book is for. You will find the melancholy and
the surreal here, but that’s as far as it goes.”
Here are a half-dozen
examples from the book:
Page 9 from January:
"Little boy on the train: Mama?
His mum: Yes?
Little boy: I never see you brush your hair.
His mum: I do a lot of things you don’t see.
(Pause)
Little boy: Like flying?"
Page 44 from March:
“A man on the train sighs as, having meticulously arranged
his lunch on his little fold-down table, the woman from the window seat beside
him needs the loo.”
Page 65 from May:
“A man has stopped on Oxford Street and stands in his socks,
as he pours what appears to be green and pink confetti out of his shoes.”
Page 117 from August:
“A man outside a yet-to-open piano shop signals frantically
to the woman inside to let him in. This is clearly a musical emergency.”
Page 137 from October:
“A little girl on a doorstep manages to negotiate eating an
entire piece of toast while having her coat put on by her mum.”
Page 164 from December:
“Like an opening fan, five people at a bus stop lean
sequentially to the left as they try to read the number of the bus coming up
the road.
There is a 24-minute YouTube video at Carers UK on August
26, 2022 titled Stopping to notice with Miranda Keeling. And there is
another newer book (I have not read) from June 2025 by Miranda Keeling titled The
Place I’m In: What I see when I stop to notice, which again has a preview at
Google Books. Miranda also has a podcast titled Stopping to Notice.
Back on February 28, 2014 I blogged about Speech topics from
near your neighborhood, and paying attention to things - like a gold Buddha
statue sitting on a white concrete bench next to the driveway of a home.
The train sign came from here at Wikimedia Commons.
