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How to Practice Paying Attention
5 ways to steer it in support of your values
Like many writers, as a kid, I was a voracious reader. When you read a lot of books, you start to think differently. Not just about the world and what you’ve learned about it, or about people and what you now understand of them, but in how you compose your thoughts. Observations shift from matter-of-fact to exquisitely detailed. Metaphors crop up when you least expect them. Even passing thoughts suddenly have color and texture to them.
For years I had a habit of keeping notebooks filled with beautiful and intriguing lines I loved from books — the kind of sentence that stops you in your tracks for its vividness and emotion, where language is at once revered and made to work at its hardest. This practice of paying attention to language, and inscribing it to hold onto it, began to seep through my subconscious. Unprompted, my brain invented lines of dialogue, descriptions, and details for stories and characters and places that didn’t exist yet. By the time I was a teenager I kept two notebooks — one for inspiring lines from authors, and a second for my own occasional stroke of writing insight. At night they sat at my bedside, ready to catch an image or idea just as I fell asleep. It didn’t matter that these sentences didn’t add up to a clear plot or narrative arc, or that they never amounted to a Real Book. It was the practice of creating space in my brain, allowing it to craft descriptions seemingly on its own that was important. I didn’t know it then, but I was developing the mind and muscle of a writer.
Something happened, though, when I arrived in corporate America years later. At night, in the shower, in my dreams — in the space between thinking, where my mind could go wherever it wanted to — I found myself mentally crafting… emails. Gone were the metaphors, the rich descriptions, the intriguing one-liners that entire stories could have been built around. Now, I was dreaming about paperwork.
What we pay attention to becomes the core of who we are and what we do. Most of us don’t think very hard about the practice of paying attention, but it is a practice. Where has our attention gone? Mostly online. We fall down the rabbit hole of email, social media, gaming, or breaking news, and when we emerge are surprised by how…
