Most of us don’t notice what holds our lives together. We notice the urgent email, the strange noise in the car, the person who disappoints us. We rarely notice the clean water, the functioning lungs, the patient friend, or the colleague who quietly keeps the whole enterprise from wobbling.

That isn’t simply ingratitude. It is also how attention works. Familiar, nonthreatening things fade into the background so we can respond to what is new. Habituation makes daily life possible—and, at the same time, makes it dangerously easy to forget what makes daily life possible.

In Until It’s Gone: Escaping the Trap of Habituation, social scientist and therapist Karima Joy gives this very modern problem an ancient face: Tefnut, the Egyptian goddess of moisture and rain.

Continue reading “What We Stop Seeing: Habituation, Gratitude, and the Return of Tefnut” →