AT PRESENT, THE VIEW FROM my desk is arguably, but in no way disagreeably, mundane. The window, formed of two panels, frames a driveway, a sidewalk, various poorly pruned trees, half a garden, and some slices of neighboring homes. A road chases itself from one side of the window to the other, and vehicles pass across the frame with a regular irregularity. Driving too fast, missing it all. More often than not—but usually almost always—a bird or two will be in one of the trees opposite, frequently a collared dove, pigeon, or jackdaw, but sometimes a magpie, the bicolor corvids still not particularly common here in the Scottish Highlands, their presence appearing to cause some contention among both other birds and people—magpie as migrant, magpie as nest-encroacher, magpie as trouble-stirrer. When the first blossoms of a certain sad cherry tree across the road come out, a pair of pigeons will sit in its branches for days on end stripping them bare, petals and buds alike. After this, the tree will look even sadder. I wonder how it keeps going.

This ordinary sort of noticing feels very normal and necessary to me but I feel decidedly unsure about how widespread it is at times. The societal narratives of the empire as they currently exist spin a sickness around value, expendability, and time. Even if people wanted to notice a sparrow landing on the end of a drainpipe to drink, they can’t. Their eyes are needed elsewhere, focusing, for a plethora of reasons, on earning money.

I was thinking the other day that, if we don’t have one already, we might need a word for when you notice a single, vulnerable seed stuck to a window. I was thinking this because I saw one, a dark, unidentifiable—to me—seed encased in a protective pale green shape, with a stem of perhaps two or three millimeters extending from one side. Its presence seemed to say, There is a choice in this, as in the leaving or the moving of the seed, or the caring about it, the potential interruption of its journey that could have easily spanned miles, hundreds or thousands of them. It has rained heavily since I saw the seed; by now it will be somewhere else.

Not only vehicles move from one side of the window to the other. People are always going left or right, too, and on good days it can feel like important work to notice their facial expressions shifting with changes of the weather, or the light. Every weekday morning, I see the same two people walk to work in high-vis clothing, both wearing backpacks, the heavy black boots of one always five minutes or so behind the other—I have therefore assumed they are not going to the same place. Also on the good days: When I notice someone in turn noticing a bird, it feels like some important chain of attention paid, of atoms, of ancient memory.