How to see your life as if it’s the first day—or last day—you have it.
“If we only saw the world for a day, we would weep with joy and awe.”
Familiarity is a thief. It steals the shine from our days. You’ve looked at the sky thousands of times, so now it’s just the sky. You’ve heard your child’s laughter, or your partner’s voice, or the hum of the refrigerator so often that you don’t even register it. The miracle dulls under repetition.
Richard Dawkins once called this the anesthetic of soporific familiarity. Life numbs us by becoming ordinary.
But here’s the thing: it’s only ordinary if we forget what it really is.
Borrowed Eyes
Imagine for a moment that you don’t see through your own eyes. Instead, you borrow the eyes of someone who never got the chance to live. Someone unborn. Someone who missed out on the lottery of existence.
What would those borrowed eyes see?
The green of grass would be shocking. The sound of water running in a sink would be symphonic. Even an ache in your heart or a chill in your fingers would feel like something sacred: experience itself.
For someone never born, one moment of your day would be treasure enough.
Now imagine another set of borrowed eyes: the eyes of your future self, one hour before death. That version of you knows the clock is down to its final ticks. What would they give to sip this breath, to look out at the world—even in its mundanity—one more time?
Would they see boredom in your morning routine, or a miracle hiding in plain sight?
The Reset Button
This experiment isn’t about guilt. It isn’t about berating ourselves for not living in a state of constant rapture. That’s impossible. Life requires errands, deadlines, worries.
But perspective is a reset button. Borrowing eyes—whether from the unborn or from your deathbed self—shakes us awake. It reminds us that existence itself is extraordinary, and that the ordinary is only ordinary when we stop paying attention.
A Practical Try
Here’s how to do the Borrowed Eyes Experiment:
- Choose your lens. Pretend you’re seeing with the eyes of someone unborn, or your own eyes an hour before death.
- Pick something mundane. A glass of water. The sound of footsteps. The texture of a wall.
- Linger for thirty seconds. Really notice it. Pretend it’s the only experience you’ll ever get—or the last one you’ll ever have.
- Write one sentence. Jot down what you saw, felt, or realized. Don’t aim for poetry. Just catch the moment before it escapes.
Do this once a week. Or once a day. It doesn’t matter. What matters is the reset.
Why It Works
The point isn’t to live permanently at this heightened pitch. That would burn us out. The point is to remember—regularly—that our lives are not guaranteed, and that we’ve already won by having them at all.
Borrowing eyes rescues us from numbness. It collapses the distance between miracle and monotony. It makes today feel like a gift again—because it is.
Closing Thought
You can’t live every second like it’s your last. But you can live some seconds that way. And those seconds are often enough to shift the whole day.
So, right now—what do you see?
Whose eyes are you seeing it with?
