The breakfast of fifth place finishers

If you've ever traveled to a place and driven through, or have been driven through, a neighbourhood and you look around, you get this sensation of seeing a place for the first time and noticing things you would not under other circumstances notice. The feeling is especially strong, that of seeing a place for the first time, when following directions to get somewhere specific.

I am by no means a world traveler, but I have traveled in my life time sufficiently to have been able to experience this sensation of seeing a place for the first time quite a number of times.

I have developed the sense such that even in my own neighbourhood, I can call it at will and look around me as if it was the first time I had ever been there and feel that same sense of new-ness. I have had this ability for quite a few years now.

In the last few weeks, perhaps the last couple of months, it has happened a handful of times that I find myself in a place where I am involuntarily experiencing this sense of new-ness in a place that should otherwise be very familiar. The thought has occurred to me how disconcerted I would be much of the time if I involuntarily experience this sense of new-ness all of the time.