The practice of paying attention
One of Mary Oliver’s most famous sayings is
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
One thing I struggle with is paying attention, unless it is to my phone. I check my email. I check Feedly. I check Instagram. I check my texts. But that’s not what I want to pay attention to. I don’t want to give years of my life to those things.
I want to know the cycle of the moon and the names of the plants growing in my yard. I want to pay attention to the needs and beauty of my tiny garden and that line of the song that’s reverberating in the living room. I want to pay attention to God’s story and God’s voice and the faces of my children. I want to know my husband’s hands and attend to our inside jokes.
Most of us have to practice attention. It goes against the grain of everything we are taught in society. We are distracted. We are blind. We run at such a pace that what we pass is a blur. We are incapable of paying attention to it. This is not an outing of you; this is a confession for myself. I’ve seen the problem and I’m been moving to make adjustments in my life.
Summer is here. We’ve spent the first week of vacation with (so far) two members of the family in the basement with covid. Despite that unexpected addition, I already knew that summer was going to be vastly different. The boys would be home. I was dropping to one class. I decided to pray about a couple of decisions, and yet plan to take no new steps with them. I'm not even going to sit and think about them for long periods of time. I also decided to break from Instagram for the summer.
I’m not against technology. I think some of the tools that the internet offers are wonderful. This is coming to you via the internet. I receive a handful of fun letters from writers (doesn’t that sound better than newsletter?) every week. I blog. I check the weather. I find recipes. I think even Instagram can be used in beneficial ways. At my best, the internet is a tool that aids my living well. At my worst, though, it consumes my time. Instagram is usually the trigger.
I want to pay more attention to my life than to my phone. I want to pay more attention to God than other people. I want to pay more attention to the world than to my fears (though often those two are tied together). And I know that being off social media changes the speed of my brain and the way I look at my life.
Maybe you too would like to pay more attention. Here are a few suggestions that may help.
1. Turn down the volume. I deleted the Instagram app on my phone a few weeks ago. I simply cannot pay attention to all that my phone parades in front of me and have much left over. Maybe you’ve already done that; maybe you have no plan to. You can also listen to fewer podcasts. Sit in silence. Go outside (without your phone). Find an evening activity that doesn’t involve a screen.
2. Take notes. Keep a gratitude list. Write down one line about the day at night. Take a short video, draw a comic. Note the particulars of your life in some way that resonates with your gifts and delights.
3. Track your questions. These can be as simple as “what is a great lunch for Tuesdays when I have a thirty-minute break?” Or as complex as “How do my gifts and interests intersect with the needs of my community?” Talk to God about all of them.
4. Return over and over to the same place. The same hiking trail, your garden, the piano. Notice the growth. What the ground looks like in the different seasons. How practice turns into something grounding.
In her book Waiting for God, Simone Weil writes, “prayer consists of attention.” I want to be a woman who prays. That will be easier if I am a woman who practices paying attention.
Do you have habits that help you pay attention? What distracts you? I’d love to hear about this.
Always,
Lisa
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