You see, but you don’t observe.

It began with an Instagram story.

Riya, my friend and classmate, had posted a simple sentence against a muted, coffee-brown background:

"You see, but you don’t observe."

I was on the bus to college, scrolling mindlessly between memes and news snippets, when I saw it. I paused for a few seconds, reread the words, and frowned slightly. They didn’t make sense. Of course I observed. Everyone did. What was so special about that? I shrugged, scrolled past, and forgot about it.

Or so I thought.

Back then, my days followed a tight script: wake up, rush to class, scribble down whatever the professor dictated, return home, and collapse in front of my laptop. I treated information like a courier service — pick it up from the lecturer, drop it onto my notebook, move on. I never questioned whether there might be a different way to understand a problem. If a math equation had one method in the book, I memorized that and never thought of another. Why bother when the answer was already there?

But Riya was different. She had this habit of asking odd questions at random moments. Questions that felt pointless at first but always made me think long after.

One afternoon, as we walked back from a statistics lecture, she turned to me and said, “You miss a lot of things.”

I laughed. “Like what? I take notes, I do the assignments…”

She shook her head. “That’s not what I mean. You see, but you don’t observe.”

There it was again — the line from her Instagram story.

“Okay, you’ve said that twice now,” I said. “What does it even mean?”

She didn’t answer directly. Instead, she pointed to a small tea stall across the street. “Tell me what you see.”

I glanced quickly. “A man making tea.”

“That’s just seeing,” she said. “Now, observe.”

I frowned, looking again. The man’s hands moved with a rhythm — three clockwise stirs, one quick counterclockwise swirl. The cup he poured into had a hairline crack running across its rim. His left hand trembled slightly as he handed it to a customer. The steam curled in a slow spiral before vanishing into the warm air.

“I never noticed all that,” I admitted.

“That’s the difference,” she said, smiling. “Observation is about details. It’s about understanding, not just glancing.”

From that day, she made it her mission to train me.

At first, it was little things. Sitting in the library, she’d nudge me and whisper, “How many books on that top shelf are leaning instead of standing straight?”

On the bus, she’d ask, “How many people here are wearing wristwatches?”

During lunch, she’d challenge me to describe the exact shade of chutney on my plate without using the word green.

At first, I found it silly. But slowly, something shifted. I started noticing the sound of chalk breaking mid-sentence on the blackboard, the faint vanilla scent from the paper of a new notebook, the way our professor’s voice softened when he explained a concept he truly loved.

One evening, Riya pushed the game further. We were in my room, surrounded by the quiet hum of the ceiling fan, when she handed me a paperclip from my desk.

“Five different uses. Go.”

I laughed. “Holding papers together.”

“Too easy.”

“A bookmark,” I said, thinking. “A phone SIM ejector. A keyring hook. A lock picker.”

She grinned. “Now you’re thinking beyond the obvious.”

It wasn’t just about objects anymore. This new way of looking at the world spilled into everything — lectures, conversations, even problem-solving. When a programming question had a set algorithm, I tried tweaking it. When designing a poster for a college event, I looked up older posters to see what had been done and how it could be improved.

Observation made my work more thoughtful, more original. It made me… curious.

The biggest shift came during an engineering drawing class. Our professor demonstrated one standard way of creating a projection. The old me would’ve copied it down and memorized it. But this time, I asked myself — what if the shape were rotated? What if I viewed it from below? Would the projection change?

I stayed back after class, experimenting with angles, sketching, erasing, sketching again. The professor noticed and smiled. “You’re starting to think like an engineer,” he said.

Observation also made life richer in ways I didn’t expect.

One rainy afternoon, Riya and I sat at the canteen, sipping ginger tea. The rain was falling in a steady, silver curtain outside. I noticed how the drops hit the puddles in tiny concentric rings, how the smell of wet earth mixed with frying pakoras, how a stray dog sat under the bench, shaking water from its fur in short, impatient bursts.

I told her what I saw.

She smiled. “You would’ve missed all that a month ago.”

The real test came when I joined a group project to design a low-cost assistive device. While my teammates brainstormed the standard solutions, I suggested starting with observing how people actually interacted with similar devices. We visited local markets, watched people using them, noticed the awkward hand movements, the discomfort in grip, the places where fabric wore out faster.

Those observations led us to redesign the handle in a way none of us had thought of before — more comfortable, cheaper to make, and surprisingly durable.

That was when I truly understood what Riya had been trying to teach me: observation isn’t just about noticing beauty. It’s about finding hidden patterns, asking better questions, and seeing possibilities that others overlook.

Months later, I sat sketching in the park. The late afternoon sun was soft, filtering through branches. I was drawing a leaf when I noticed its shadow falling on my page — a perfect heart. I froze, smiling. A tiny detail, but it felt like a private gift from the world.

I remembered Riya’s words again: You see, but you don’t observe.

Not anymore.

Now, I observe. I notice. I question. I create. And it has changed my life forever.