Psychologist Jer Clifton points to the value of “homeland tourism” where you “open your eyes to beauty that familiarity hides.” In a recent interview, he explains an exercise he devised. The complete version of the “Leaf Exercise” can be found in his 2013 paper. Here, I’m quoting and paraphrasing from the “How Your Beliefs Shape Reality” episode of the Hidden Brain podcast. Jer gives these instructions:

• Go to a park or a forest and pluck a single leaf from a tree.

• Examine the leaf. Notice the patterns on the front and back. Soak up the beauty in that single leaf.

• Pluck a second leaf. Appreciate its beauty. Note how the story of this leaf is similar, but not the same as the first one you plucked.

• Take a step back and look at the tree. (The average adult oak tree has 250,000 leaves.) Recognize that each leaf is a beautiful thing.

• Take a proverbial step back. Imagine the forests of Siberia and the Amazon.

• Take yet another step back and consider all the plants and trees that have gone before you that produced the air that you now breathe and all the trees that will come (because you just have a slice in time).

• Recognize that all these leaves, if they were rare, “would be mounted and placed in halls of art. It’s only that they’re ubiquitous that they fall and we walk on them, and they’re considered worthless.”

• Then, ask yourself: What sort of world is this?

* * *

What you discover during this exercise will not be exactly what I discover. But it will likely rhyme.

We live in a world so full of beauty — so intensely and completely wondrous — that its very nature can become invisible to us. Through awe, curiosity, and reflection … we can reconnect to that infinite beauty, and begin to see it once more.

H/T Shankar Vedantam for the engaging and generous work he creates, and to Dr. Jer Clifton for his profound reflection.