Shifting your gaze

“Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

-Ferris Bueller

A few weeks ago, we were out to dinner with some friends. Everyone had a taste for Mexican food, so we went to this great little spot, Qué Rico, across from Julie‘s art studio. The food there is just excellent. It’s a family-owned place on Southport here in Chicago. Highly, highly recommend if you’re in the area.

Like so many restaurants, they’ve got specials posted on the wall, and a standard day-to-day menu (Mexican meatloaf is a cannot-miss specialty). Having been there before, some of us had our favorites that we were absolutely going to order again.

But this spot was new to my good friend Barb, often a creature of habit. And she found herself focused for a while on one side of the menu, the right side. At one point, she decided to, in her words, shift her gaze. She would order off the other side of the menu. She very deliberately chose to order something she would not ordinarily choose.

Turns out she loved her choice.

Now, that shift wasn’t necessary or particularly life-altering, but it turned out pretty great for Barb nonetheless.

And that night, I found myself quite taken with this idea of shifting our gaze. There was something about it that felt beyond handy. It seemed like one of those ideas we should be carrying around in our minds a lot of the time, shifting our gaze, try something new, taking in a different sight, a different song, a different book, a different point of view.

The utility of habit

Because too often, I think we get locked into position. Habit occupies more of our time, our days and eventually our years, than we would like to admit. Hell, it takes up more time than we’re even remotely aware of (see every study done on people guessing how much time they spend daily on social media vs. their reality).

And so we do the things that we have made ordinary and routine, over and over again. Out of expediency, we repeat the same behaviors, ensuring blinders are securely in place so that our gaze doesn’t shift.

Maximum efficiency.

The result, and my own personal experience, suggests that over time habits expand, and we begin to experience the same day, more or less, over and again. We lock ourselves into our own personal Groundhog Day.

For an awful lot of the moments in our lives, that’s perfectly fine. Our habits carve easy, predictable grooves into our day-to-day lives, leaving time and space available for the things that need to be done, allowing room for the unpredictable.

I personally have a ridiculously rigid set of habits, regimens and routines that drive my mornings, for example. I get up at the same time every day. My feet hit the floor, and I am up and running, literally, on a treadmill within 15 minutes. I’m showered and out the door shortly after that. The wiggle room around my morning routine beginning-to-end is about five minutes.

And that’s fine. That works for me.

But I do wonder if I could shift my gaze a little bit, change it up from time to time, perhaps even all the time. Maybe I sit and talk with Julie for a few extra minutes. Perhaps I read an inspiring passage or two to drive the vibe of the day. Maybe I listen to music instead of a podcast once I’m in the car. Maybe shifting my gaze would enrich my mornings.

See, when we think too rigidly, there’s some lost potential there.

I suspect we all know that there’s a tipping point in here somewhere, a space in which we are so driven by habit that we lose our inclination toward flexibility and creativity and experimentation. Habit is expedient to be sure. But it can be drab, draining and joyless as well.

Why the shift?

Let’s talk for a moment about why it’s important to break from habit and shift our gaze from time to time. For one, I don’t think we spend enough time thinking about how we spend our time, moment-to-moment, day-to-day, year-to-year. And this meta-level look at our lives is really important. Our time is fleeting, and the way we spend it is our only imprint on the people around us, on this world.

This is not incidental.

Taking a moment to shift our gaze, consider our options, taking in something fresh and new through our senses, is super important. Stop and think for an honest moment about when the last time was that you chose a different path, even for a few seconds. When was the last time you broke routine or habit? When was the last time you tried something new? When was the last time you challenged one of your own assumptions?

Therapeutic applications

Ever since that night that Barb changed her order, I’ve been thinking on and off about the phrase shifting your gaze. And I realize that an awful lot of therapy is about shifting gaze. For the better part of two decades, one of my go-to gurus was Dr. Wayne Dyer. I read every one of his dozen or so books, and saw him speak many times. Among his most often repeated phrases, his favorite themes, was this:

“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

This I find to be fundamental to the way I practice therapy: Let’s take a deep dive together into the way that you look at yourself, the world, and the future. Are you reasonable, measured and fair? Are you harsh and judgmental? Do you look through a lens of despair or hopelessness?

Answering these questions can liberate the mind. I don’t want to minimize the importance of that at all.

That said, shifting your gaze on occasion is a very different exercise. This shift isn’t about changing the way you look at things, or altering your perspective. Shifting your gaze is about broadening your perspective. It’s about considering options you might not have previously considered. This can be as simple as Barb ordering off the other side of the menu and being happy with her choice.

But it can have broader, life-altering, implications as well. For instance, I recently heard from the mom of a young man I worked with years ago. To date, he had followed the expected trajectory in his life. By the time I met him, he was a senior in high school. School had been a persistent, massive struggle for him, a burden every single year. He had difficulty concentrating, and found he had precious little interest in what was happening in the classroom. But he was coached well and his gaze remained fixed, the culture around him suggesting that he look solely toward college. This was what was expected. There’s no reason to look anywhere else. Getting into college, this was the thing to do.

Really, the only thing.

And so he did. He started off at a large state school, and experienced the same familiar feeling he had endured in every other academic setting since kindergarten:

“This isn’t for me. This just can’t be my entire life. I’m miserable here.”

The persistent result of this dissonance was clinically significant and intrusive, an overt, measurable dose of depression and anxiety.

Late one Saturday night during his first semester, I was alarmed to see he was calling me. A teenager, calling. On the phone. This was weird, and felt a tad ominous. Fearful that something awful had happened, I picked up the call immediately.

“Duffy, I have a quick question for you. Do plumbers make good money? My friend here says plumbers make really good money.”

I was more than a little perplexed.

“Yeah, actually they do.”

“OK, what do you do to become a plumber?”

Having worked with some people in the trades, I walked him through what I knew about apprenticeships and unions and the very, very little knowledge I carried about plumbing itself.

“Okay, I’m packing up and coming home. I’m gonna be a plumber.”

To my surprise, he did just that. He went against the grain of his parents’ wishes, of his entire upbringing, of the culture that surrounded him in his cushy childhood suburb. I asked him what made the difference:

“Well, I grew up believing there was only one way to live successfully, only one thing you could do. Talking to my friends that night, I realized I had options. And plumbing, I freakin’ love that option. So I’m doing it.”

He’s a working plumber today. And he’s virtually free of the anxiety and depression that have plagued him most of his life. This is certainly not coincidental.

If you’ve been reading my Substack, you know my life changed in a similar way. I thought my only way was through college, one college in particular, to an accounting degree, a CPA, and a career in auditing.

The moment I learned that psychology was a viable option for me, I shifted my gaze and never looked back.

This gaze-shifting stuff might change what you have for dinner. It also might change your entire life.

It’s the little things

That’s the macro stuff. But shifting your gaze can change your mood in a moment. A while back, I worked with a woman in her mid 20s, we can call her Susan. She was one of the finest human beings I’ve ever known: smart, sweet, deep and sensitive. I will never forget the one session in particular when she arrived about 10 minutes late, soaking wet.

It was raining that day here in Chicago, storming. She lived about a half a mile away and decided to walk to the session. She left her umbrella at home, because she wanted to just feel the cool mid-summer rain gently falling on her. She told me she would stop every block or so and turn her face to the sky, watch the rain come down, feel it on her face. She stopped to witness the raindrops dipping flower petals with their gentle gravity and weight. She watched them bounce jauntily off cars and pavement. She said we don’t stop to consider the beauty around us often enough. We just rush right past it all, gorgeous moments skipped or missed in favor of habit, expectation, staying dry.

But she took it all in, and was so excited to tell me about how beautiful the rain was. Her enthusiasm was flat-out intoxicating, and you can bet that, whenever I was in the rain after that, I took a moment to shift my gaze up to take it all in

And Susan was right, there’s enormous joy in that, joy that we systematically, serially blow off.

I saw Susan recently, and she reminded me that she was a just a high school freshman at the time of our first session, more than a decade ago. She was angry that her parents were making her see a therapist, so she sat on the end of the couch, and fixed her gaze to the corner of the room. She wouldn’t look at me nor would she speak to me. She laughed at how far she’d come since then. She went from refusing help when it was just a few feet away to seeking it out. Talk about shifting your gaze.

So take a moment right now and shift your gaze. Attend to something different. Listen to something different. Go somewhere different. Talk to someone new. Read a random Substack. See if it doesn’t make you feel different. See if it doesn’t open your eyes to something fresh and new.

And if you’re a parent, point out your discoveries to your kids. Get them shifting their gaze now. Let them make that a new part of their daily habits.

Our life on this orb is so fleeting. It would be a terrible shame to walk right by the most beautiful parts.