Starting in on the topic of found items, it seems easy. When they drift across your path, that is. When small people come up and press them into your hands.
But when the breeze stops blowing, or the child moves off in search of something else, it can be harder. They start to become Looked For Items, rather than found ones.
I discovered by about day 2 that this was harder than I thought. Which is OK, really.
A number of the topics I’ve picked for myself to write about have turned out to be harder – it’s just that I normally discover this on day 10, or thereabouts.
One option can be to put yourself in places where it’s easier for items to be found. Looking in shop windows, checking the floor of a bus, keeping your eyes peeled while doing a familiar walk.
That has certainly helped. But it becomes less spontaneous after a while. And I think that, at least on starting out, the found item has also needed to be one that Suddenly Arrived.
Unplanned. But recognised as right. Something that resonates with you, something you were looking for but didn’t know until you found it.
Pretty soon on after starting this series, I understood that I approach learning in this way, as a series of found items. In the past, I was confident that I could keep reading and master a subject area.
Now, that seems an impossible task. So much is written, constantly, that you couldn’t ever hope to read it all. And these days, I’m not reading for an exam. I don’t need to try to do so.
The rush of reading that started last autumn was a realisation of how much you could learn, simply from going from blog post to blog post, link to link, author to author.
Part of the reason I kept reading instead of writing was the lure of the unexpected information hit. Keep reading, keep following links, and BAM! you’ve learned something new.
(I toyed with spending October writing about what I’ve learned – without planning to – over a year of reading lots of blogs. But then the postcard turned up, and I changed direction. Which suggests something of the positive effect of a good found item.)
I’ve come to think that much knowledge arrives in this way – certainly now when so much information is available online.
With the web a blur of tiny pieces, touching and not touching, sometimes you can only start to glimpse it when you turn over one tiny piece. When you read one blog post, and make a connection as a result.
The same is true of newspapers, actually. Encyclopedias. Almanacs. It doesn’t have to be online – but online makes it easy to roam freely in your reading.
For all of this, the topic of found items also seems to suggest that at least some of those items need to be ‘real’ – as in ones that you can touch, smell, encounter in the physical world.
If Duchamp had just gone around thinking, and not considering real items (like the famous urinal), art wouldn’t have gone in this direction. And actually, it can be great to see something considered everyday, and view it in an entirely new light.
I don’t know how many small pieces of revelation-waiting-to-happen are lying in wait for me. I don’t know if it’s pie in the sky to think that way, to expect the world to constantly surprise you.
But I think the opportunity to see the great in the small, familiar things is one worth seizing. We may go looking, rather than simply finding.
But at least we are expectant that something good is out there, and that it will reveal itself to us if we are willing to wait, and look again.