Slowing Down To See More

Santa Lucia

The scooter barely slowed, the street blurred past, and whatever was painted on that hoarding barely registered at all.

What he rode past was Santa Lucia, a fourth-century saint whose image has been painted on walls and altarpieces across the Mediterranean for seventeen centuries. She is the patron saint of sight. In most depictions she carries her eyes on a plate, offered outward, a gift of vision to those who choose to look.

He didn’t look.

We move faster now than any generation before us, and we have come to mistake movement for awareness. The scooter accelerates, the day fills, the screen refreshes, and we arrive at the end of it having covered considerable ground without having seen very much at all. Speed creates the sensation of engagement while quietly narrowing what actually registers.

The irony is almost too precise to be accidental. The patron saint of sight, standing in plain view, unseen. We think we see because our eyes are open and our attention feels busy. But attention pulled in every direction is not the same as attention properly given, and forward focus can itself become a form of blindness.

The things worth pausing for increasingly blur into the background. Not because they have moved. Because we have.

What did you pass today without properly seeing it?