What is Observance? And a great life hack
Put simply Observance is this:
Definition: (Noun) – The act or process of observing.
Observance in a bit more detail …
- Observance is a daily practice.
- Observance is a skill and is only effective if it’s worked on and practiced regularly.
- Observance is like mindfulness as it involves focusing on various elements in your surroundings and in yourself however it goes beyond well mindfulness.
- Observance varies from mindfulness in that it also involves object and pattern recognition and the relation of these objects and patterns to ones you’ve stored in your memory.
- Observance requires a high level of focus on the subject being observed and on directly related thoughts and patterns.
- Observance has the purpose of helping us to make sense of the world. This can be of very small simple things (eg: an insect) or very large eg: The universe).
- Observance always involves both of the dimensions, Time and Space. Something that involves both time and space is defined as an event.
- Observance in the dimension of time can be almost instantaneous or, can take generations or (with the help of technology such as carbon dating, radio telescopes, etc), millions of years.
- Observance in the dimension of space can be (using a photography analogy) within a narrow depth of field or very wide depth of field.
- Observance in the dimension of space can be made within the limitations of human senses or (with the help of technology, eg: microphones, telescopes, microscopes, etc), well beyond human senses.
- Observance can involve observing multiple events and combining them to form pattern observations. (eg: Someone’s smoking habit, El Nino and La Nina weather patterns, how an ants legs work together to make it walk, etc).
- Observance is the fuel that fires Intuition.
- Observance helps us to create a structure and skeleton of our reality.
- Observance is the natural partner to Imagination. As I’ve said elsewhere, Where Observance is the structure and skeleton of our reality, imagination becomes the muscles and skin.
This is not an exhaustive list but it gives you a bit of an idea. Feel free to comment below to add to this list.
Observance is a daily practice and is most naturally used alongside imagination, thus this site’s name “Observance Imaginate.” I want to teach you a bit more about imagination and what role it plays alongside observance in a practical sense so I’ll make another post dedicated to it shortly.
The structure and method I have developed for the daily practice of Observance and Imagination will be outlined shortly. I’ll link it here when it’s up.
What the practice of Observance isn’t
- Mindfulness
- Noticing things
- Looking at stuff
- Observing an object out of its context
- The power of deduction
Although any one of these things don’t define Observance, they are all a part of it. You need to be mindful but it’s a step beyond mindfulness. You definitely need to notice things and look at stuff but there’s a method and a skill involved to doing it effectively. You do need to look at things out of their context but also within their context to get the correct idea of all of it’s attributes and how it works within a system. It is the power behind deduction but that is a very positive result of practicing Observance.
I promised a little Life Hack in the title to start you off on your observation journey so without further ado, here it is.
This is a very simple and effective little thing you can practice now to immediately increase your Observance skills and start becoming sharper, smarter and healthier, mentally and physically straight away.
It incorporates the ‘Splash’ phase of observance (Don’t worry, I’ll explain all that later on) and activates your memory and imagination and only takes a couple of minutes.
Lets start
- Look around you and choose something to observe. It can be absolutely anything, even a person, but you might want to be discrete if it is.
- Close your eyes or just look away for at least 5 seconds.
- Now look back at your object for only a fraction of a second then close your eyes.
- Use your memory to recall as many details as you can about that object and write them down.
- Now look back and see how many things you observed correctly and what you may have got wrong. If you got anything wrong that’s totally normal and ok. It’s just your imagination filling in the gaps for you. The better you become at observing, the less your imagination has to work to fill in those gaps.
Do this once a day for the next week and watch your observance skills start coming into effect. After you get used to doing it with sight, experiment with observing using different senses like hearing and touch.
What this does for you
Activating your mind in an intense focus like this utilising not only observation but also memory and imagination is a mind workout. It immediately helps you focus, feel more energetic, remember things better and increases creativity. All of this in turn aids in feeling more self confident and happy. That’s a pretty good result in my books.
Observance Imaginate 