I think we can all recall that moment back in our school days when we weren’t our perfect selves and were admonished by the teacher to “pay attention!” Conversation with our neighbour would momentarily cease, and… seconds later, another student would receive the same reprimand. Unfortunately, the frequency at which the advice was dispensed dulled its effectiveness and our understanding of how vital attention was to our learning.
Indeed, if you start poking around at almost anything to do with personal or spiritual development, paying attention proves to be foundational to the attainment of any knowledge or wisdom. From its Latin root, attentionem, someone rapt with attention is singularly devoting themselves to what lies before them, be it a piece of music, an exotic Asian lily, a sleeping child, a 500-piece puzzle or a 1,000-page tome.
But in a world that is being increasingly reduced to the size of tweets, blogs, Google headlines, Facebook posts, sound bytes and 16-second advertisements, our attention tends to “leak,” distracting us from the harder task of single-minded concentration.
Vancouver-based writer, Michael Harris, suggests in his book End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection that instead of seeking substance, we are conditioned to seek frisson, or brief moments of emotional excitement. Those times we find we cannot scroll past a video on our Facebook feed until we find out whether Whiskers trapped in a cardboard box escapes, confirms our frisson-seeking natures.
Moreover, the multitasking feat of watching cute-cat videos while cooking a meal, talking on the phone, and appraising our grandchild’s finished science project, remains a poor substitute for single-minded concentration. As our brains are only capable of focusing on one thing at a time, says Harris, what we call multitasking is actually multi-switching (i.e., quickly diverting attention from one thing to the next).
This ability was essential to our homo sapiens brain when we needed to reflexively orient ourselves in a potentially dangerous environment. And, as so many studies have shown, a switching, scanning, skimming brain (which can only process rote information) is seldom a productive, inventive brain. And yet this is precisely the brain that is called into action in the flashing, flickering playland of distractions competing for our attention today.
An excess of stimulation and our compulsion for constant connection has precipitated what Harris calls “the end of absence” – that uncluttered time to truly ponder something. And sustained attention, which requires a complete relinquishment of self – or at least, one’s habitually distracted self – ultimately means the absence of others as well.
One doesn’t learn the intricacies of jazz chords, flight theory, marine laws or create one’s masterpiece when one is anxiously attending to one’s social calendar. Tending to one’s inner life and integrating oneself with the world (what psychoanalyst Carl Jung termed “the process of individuation”) requires a detachment from daily concerns.
That attention may also bring one closer to a cosmological understanding of the universe is not lost upon generations of philosophers, healers and artists. Ojibway writer, poet and seer Richard Wagamese, in Embers, the last book published before his untimely death in 2017, powerfully reminds us of the gifts that await those who have the patience to pay attention.
Looking up after clearing ice and snow from his car windows outside his home near Kamloops, he notices “the ballet of cat tracks in the snow, the bare trees like arterial networks in the dimness, the house slumped like a great sleeping bear under the white rug of winter.” He concludes that “the secret of fully being here, walking the skin of this planet, is to learn to see things as though I were looking at them for the first time, or the last. Nothing is too small, too mundane, too usual. Everything is wonder.”
Everything is wonder. Perhaps if we “stimulus junkies” all settle into those unexplored spaces that have opened in our pandemic-restricted world, and dig a little deeper beneath the layers of frisson and data of this wired world, each of our child selves will reclaim that wonder, not the teacher’s pardon or praise, that is the reward for paying attention.
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