Everyone has fallen victim to looking at their feet. We become more concerned about where we’re placing our feet instead of our surroundings. All too often I’ve been in a new place, or on a hike with my mother, and I’ll forget to look up at the trees or to scenery passing me by. I even missed a shooting star my friend sitting next to me saw (the first one she has ever seen) because I had been too busy looking down at my phone.
We even fall victim to not noticing things in our everyday, familiar lives. We become desensitized to the environment we walk through daily so much so that we don’t even notice when a piece of furniture has moved or there is a new scratch on the floor. We forget to look, and we fail to see.
Well, maybe we don't all fail to see, especially not "The Cheese Monkeys." This novel, written by Chip Kidd, is my favorite book. I found it at a library book sale in the corner of the one dollar bin that I had been merely skimming over. The odd graphics and aggressively orange cover had caught my attention, and the price tag interested me enough to throw it in my must-buy pile.
Boy, am I glad I was looking hard enough to see this book.
“The Cheese Monkeys” is all about this concept of seeing — what we see, what we don’t see, and what we ought to see. Every page is laced with lessons about what we choose to pay attention to in new and routine situations. As one may assume, the moral of the book is to really look at everything you can, to always look up and around at the world, and decide what’s important from those observations. Though, to me, the most important “mini lesson” about sight comes from the room test.
Stop what you are doing. Don’t look at anything but your screen.
How many windows are in the room you’re in?
What’s the color of the floor?
What’s the color of the walls?
How many walls are there?
How many pictures are on the walls?
How many tables are there in the room?
How many items are on the nearest table to you? How many of these things are paper based?
If there are other people in the room, what does the shirt of the person to your right look like?
What do the shoes of the person to your left look like?
Do your shoelaces still have their aglets?
Is the room quiet? Is there a background sound? A background hum?
Alright, you can look around the room now. How many things did you get right? How many things did you automatically know? What didn’t you know? More often than not, when someone tries the room test, they don’t do as well as they thought they would. We think we know our surroundings, but have we really looked at our environment?
Though why is the room test important? Consider this passage said by Winter Sorbeck, a teacher in the “Cheese Monkeys:” “‘You have to eat the world with your eyes. You must look at everything as if you’re going to die in the next five minutes, because in the relative scheme of things, you are. You can’t miss a trick,'" (pg 105). You can’t miss a thing, because you never know when it will leave your line of sight. You have to take in the world and process it so it can better enhance your life. Does the color of the floor really affect your life? No, but the action of looking is what’s important. You never know when your focus will pay off in the long run.
Consider my experiences in college. If I hadn’t looked over my shoulder during my division meeting the first day of school and seen Margot sitting by herself, if I hadn’t asked her to sit next to me, I wouldn’t have such a great friend. If I hadn’t noticed the funny girl in my tour group when I was originally applying to Champlain, I wouldn’t be sitting next to my now friend Erika writing on a Friday night. If I hadn’t looked in the corner of the one dollar book bin, I wouldn’t have my favorite book.
So I ask this of you: consider what “The Cheese Monkeys” moral is and look at the world around you. You don’t know what you’ll see, and you don’t know how it will affect you. Observe the world, and let it give you what it has to offer.
And please read the book. Trust me, you’ll learn a lot about life.
