When life gets a little too quick and you start to go through the motions of your routine, what do people usually tell you to do?

Slow down.

When life gets way too quick and you start to drown in the monotony of a routine that is based on accomplishing a single task, what is your first impulse?

Stop and smell the roses.

Have you ever stopped to think why it is we encourage people to smell flowers when they are overwhelmed?

Sure, they're beautiful and they usually smell pretty good, but why roses? What if you're allergic to roses? What if you need to slow down but it's the middle of the winter, when fresh roses exist as only a memory under a layer of frost on your windshield? What if roses bring back a painful memory of loss?

Try stopping to smell a strawberry instead. Smell it, feel it, taste it, really look at it.

Once you've checked all of those sensory things off of your list, listen to the strawberry. Seriously, ignore every fiber of your being that is telling you "put that strawberry down before you get kicked out of the produce aisle at a Walmart, for God's sake" and just listen to the strawberry. Hold the fruit up to your ear and run your fingers over its surface, just listening to the sounds that the friction makes. Ruffle the leaves and the stem and really focus on the sounds.

Now put the strawberry down and run out of Walmart because, odds are, somebody is going to call security on the crazy person whispering to fruits.

This was the exact experience that I underwent while participating in a workshop with poets Nickole Brown and Jessica Jacobs. Well, the exact experience minus the bit about being kicked out of Walmart because I was surrounded by a room full of other weirdos feeling up strawberries and waiting for them to speak. It was a casual, quite normal Friday afternoon in the High Point University Phoenix Reading Series, but the strawberry truly began to speak to me.

Understanding the risk I am taking in sounding as if I have finally lost my mind, I will step outside of the realm of flowery language for a moment to explain what I mean. All jokes aside, this experience truly does change the way you participate in the world. If each step is done correctly, you will find yourself with a new understanding of everyday things. You will make connections with everyday objects and the most familiar things will become strange and new again.

This concept was introduced at the beginning of the workshop as the art of "Ostranenie". What the heck is caught in your throat, you ask? Why, the very thing that will bring you back to your childhood understanding of the world, the key to play in writing and daily life. This Russian concept encourages individuals to defamiliarize themselves with the things that we see and interact with on a daily basis, in an attempt to hyper focus on them and view the world as a child would, as if everything were suddenly new and amazing again.

I'm sure someone has been ending this and thought "Meagan, why are you so invested in this weird, artsy stuff", but hear me out: it will change the way you look at things. I can't guarantee they will all be positive new viewpoints, but I can guarantee that you will leave with something new. If you're like me, it may be a realization that you need to let go of some things that are really not that important and take time to slow down and appreciate the small things in life for what they are.

It doesn't necessarily have to be an observation of the way that a ripe strawberry will not squeak as much as an unripe strawberry when you run your finger over it. It may be the observation that the fruit's smell does a complete 180 after you bite into it. It may be the realization that the sight of a strawberry brings you back to your most fond, or most wretched, childhood memories. The small things you notice may not all be beautiful or positive and that's exactly why Ostranenie is a wonderful practice. It not only teaches you to appreciate things you take for granted by relearning the world, it also teaches you to accept things as they are along the way.

Nothing in life its rule and purely beautiful forever. Everything has its ugly side, even if that ugly side is just a slightly unappetizing face in the side of a strawberry. Nothing is perfect and progressing into an adulthood that seeks perfection and pushes the mind to keep a constant, rapid pace robs us of this ability to observe and "make weird." This is a sad notion, because it is exactly this "making weird" that not only opens the artist's soul to new forms of expression, but the human's ability to understand life as it exists: imperfect, but beautiful.