Making the Familiar Strange Again

B. Alan Wallace writes about how our perception is shaped by habit.  We move through our lives on autopilot, seeing what we expect rather than what’s genuinely present.  The familiar fades into invisibility, not because it’s unimportant, but because it’s already been filed away by the mind as known.

Home is our most familiar space.  It’s so easily reduced to memory and routine.  Walking into a bedroom, we might not see it as it is, but as it always seems to be.  Efficiency helps us navigate, but it dims our awareness of the spaces that could support us, or not.  We stop noticing how some rooms restore us more than others, how different corners hold different moods, how our relationship to place changes with emotion and time. 

Scent, I’ve found, gently disrupts this automatic way of seeing.

Introducing a new scent: a hint of cedar, a breath of citrus, creates a brief unfamiliarity.  The room is unchanged, and yet, with scent, my senses are pulled away from autopilot.  There’s a moment before I label or analyze the smell, where experience is raw and immediate.  Curiosity has an opening.

This isn’t about using scent as a fix—lavender for sleep, peppermint for energy.  That’s just another way of managing.  Instead, it’s about letting scent be a reference point, a marker in the space to help me pay attention: Which rooms truly calm me, and when?  Where do I drift naturally, and where do I push?  How does my feeling about a corner or a seat shift from day to day? 

Scent isn’t a blank slate.  Each oil arrives with its own associations—lavender is calm, citrus is bright.  These qualities aren’t invented by marketers; they’re real, rooted in experience.  But the practice is not about wielding those effects like switches.  It’s about sensing honestly: using the consistency of a scent in a space to notice what actually changes—my mood, my energy, my needs.

Like any practice, this takes time.  At first, I may simply notice the smell and call it "pleasant."  But returning, day after day, with the same scent to the same room, a deeper noticing often unfolds.  Patterns appear that weren’t obvious before.  Maybe a room feels tense, but only when I’m avoiding something I’d rather not face.  Maybe silence isn’t truly necessary for focus; a certain hum of sound helps me work.

These are discoveries lived, not thought-up or willed into existence, but seen through patient, gentle attention.

For instance, over the past two weeks, I’ve been paying close attention to my evening showers after a small renovation.  The space itself feels different—expanded, refreshed.  I started adding a drop or two of Roman chamomile to a foot bath, and let its scent fill the shower room.  On most evenings, the chamomile has made the shower feel spacious and satisfying, no matter how long or short I lingered.  But some days, I felt uneasy, restless, wanting to rush and get out.  The sense of pampering myself wasn’t there, even though the scent was lovely.  Eventually, I noticed: those unsettled days matched times when I left work or personal projects unfinished.  On the nights I felt calm and restored, I had completed a task—big or small didn’t matter—before showering.  The scent never changed; my sense of ease did.

One thing worth remembering is that scent isn’t a prescription.  Its power is in inviting awareness, not enforcing a mood.  You may notice the presence of a scent most vividly in the first minutes, then it fades gently into the background.  If you find the effect changes from day to day, it doesn’t mean you’re doing it ‘wrong’, it means you’re practicing with honesty.  That, to me, is the heart of mature scent practice.

Any scent, whether new and unfamiliar or old and beloved, can play this role.  An unfamiliar scent brings raw presence; familiar ones become steady landmarks.  The scent stays constant, but everything else shifts, revealing the rhythms of living that were otherwise invisible.

Scent weaves its way into spatial memory, quietly marking experience.  Over time, those associations help make changing patterns visible.

And at home, with scents I’ve chosen and spaces I know intimately, there’s no performance required.  No one asking for insight, no pressure for transformation. Just noticing, simple, honest.

“See things as they are.”  It sounds simple, but it’s rare.  Most of the time, I see things as I expect them, or need them, or wish they would be.  True seeing, undistorted, isn’t easy, but it’s possible.  The home is a forgiving place for this kind of practice. The stakes are low, it’s just familiar rooms.  But what emerges can be profoundly true.

There are rooms I avoid, chairs I never sit in, corners where things gather because I can’t decide.  There are spaces that restore me on some days and feel stifling on others.  Scent brings just enough newness to break the trance of familiarity, without threatening comfort or requiring change.

And that—patient, gentle attention, looking without judgment or expectation—is where self-knowledge begins.  Not in affirmations or products, not in striving for improvement, but simply in the act of noticing.

When I begin to see in this way, genuine curiosity finds room to grow.  And from that, something more resilient and real than performative self-love quietly develops.

Attention is what’s needed.  Sometimes all it takes is a scent, lingering in the air, to remind me to give it.

If you’re curious about the nature of attention and how our perceptions are shaped by habit, B. Alan Wallace’s The Attention Revolution is a thoughtful, accessible starting point.  His work explores how we rarely see things as they truly are, and how gentle practice (of any kind) can open new ways of experiencing both self and surroundings.