Just about two years ago to the day, I had a dining hall meal which, even as it fades, has never quite rid itself from my memory.

I was a freshman at the time, eating with a senior friend whom I had met through the Folk Choir. My freshman self was only capable of sustaining basically two conversation topics: Notre Dame and Notre Dame. We dialectically examined our reasons for coming to the university, made obligatory remarks about finding so many great people here, and gushed about other largely uninteresting things. Stupidly searching for a new sub-topic, I remember asking him what his favorite thing about campus was. For a second, he was caught in the obvious dilemma of someone who cannot decide whether to say the weird thing he is actually thinking or rather something decidedly more normal. I suppose he split the difference because he finally answered my question with a question: “Have you ever noticed that the trees are three-dimensional?”

The best I could provide was a confused chuckle. After a lifetime of staking a significant part of my self-worth on my ability to answer questions, I can say without qualification that this was the most difficult one I had ever been posed. Of course, I knew trees were three-dimensional; that was one of the firmest, most certain bits of my intellect. I had no reason to believe I would ever find a tree on campus that was not three-dimensional. But that was not what I had been asked. “Have you ever noticed that the trees are three-dimensional?” I felt a quarter-second of righteous anger about the ridiculousness of the question. What does it even mean to notice that something is three-dimensional? How are you supposed to notice something that is always and everywhere true? The question disturbed me just enough that it has echoed in the back of my mind for multiple years now, leading me to suspect that my friend touched on a reality far weightier than dendrology on that night in the dining hall.

His question was a challenge to me, a challenge to the piece of myself that only knows and forgets to notice. This is a privation generally, but it is most detrimental in relation to other people. The truth is that the human heart does not long to be known at a distance, abstractly, like I knew that trees were three-dimensional. Instead, we long to be noticed in the way that my friend notices trees, caught up in a moment of their mystery.

I had been actively failing in that regard during the course of my dinner that night two years ago, only interested in gathering facts about my friend and fitting him into some sort of mental picture with ever-greater clarity. I had not bothered to ask what he was going through at the moment, or what was bringing him joy. I had not asked him about the ways in which he wished to grow, or what he wanted from his final semester of college. I was distracted, only considering my next destination, effectively passing my friend by in slow-motion, like a tree on the quad. I was sitting with him but not present to him, speaking to him but not noticing him. Thank goodness he had the courage to arrest me with such a bizarre question that night; otherwise I might have known all about him without getting to know him at all. It really is uncompromisingly quirky that he contemplates trees the way that he does, but I am forced to concede that if we do not learn such contemplative attention somehow, we shall never know how to truly see the world around us, especially one another.

“Have you ever noticed that trees are three-dimensional?” Not trees in general, but these trees. The trees here. The tree right in front of you. It is truly a wonderful question, that is, a question full of wonder. It comes from the heart of someone practiced in a kind of wonder which is timeless and undistracted, the heart of someone never too busy to let the smallest, most obvious truth become the object of his undivided, detailed attention. Such attention is a gift, perhaps one of the greatest gifts that we can offer to our friends and those around us, but it must be practiced and grown. In that light, I submit that we all might do well to notice that the trees are three-dimensional. Sure you know, but have you noticed?

Simon Brake is a junior PLS and theology major. He does not wish to insult anyone’s intelligence with this piece; he just wants to be noticed. An email to sbrake@nd.edu will also suffice.