The Rewards of Paying Attention

I think we can all remember that moment in class when we weren’t our perfect self and were admonished by the teacher to ‘pay attention’! The frequency with which the advice was dispensed meant that it was seldom given the respect it deserved.

Paying Attention = Attentionem

If you start poking around at virtually anything do with learning, self-development or spiritual understanding, paying attention is foundational to the attainment of any knowledge or wisdom. From the Latin, 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 1000-page tome.

Paying Attention or Seeking Frisson?

More often than not though, in worlds that are being increasingly reduced to the size of tweets, blogs, Google headlines, facebook posts, soundbytes and ten second advertisements, our attention ‘leaks’, distracting us from the harder task of single-minded concentration. Writer Michael Harris – in “End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection”(2014)- suggests that instead of seeking substance, we are conditioned to seek frisson. Frisson are those moments of titillation experienced, for instance, in finding out whether Whiskers trapped in a cardboard box in the video will escape.

Multi-Tasking or Multi-Switching?

Moreover, watching this cute-cat video while cooking a meal, talking on the phone, and appraising your child’s finished science project cannot be considered heroic multi-tasking, says Harris. Our brains are only capable of focusing on one thing at a time. What is called multi-tasking is actually multi-switching, being able to quickly divert attention from one thing to the next. This is something our brains were adapted to do, being essential to reflexively orienting our homo-sapiens selves in potentially dangerous environments.

As so many studies have shown, a switching, scanning, skimming brain (which can only process rote information), is seldom a productive, inventive brain. Considering the flashing, flickering playland of distractions competing for our attention today, one could say the rise of excess in our society is largely responsible for the ‘end of absence’, i.e., that uncluttered time to truly ponder something.

Paying Attention is Turning Inward

Sustained attention, which requires a complete relinquishment of self, or at least, one’s habitual distracted self, ultimately, means 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 one’s self with the world (what Carl Jung termed ‘the process of individuation’) requires a detachment from daily concerns.

…….and Outward

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” (2016), the last book published before his death in March, 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” (p.170). 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”.

…..all the way to Wonder

Everything is wonder. Perhaps if we ‘stimulus junkies’ were all to 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 nor the ‘parent’s’ praise, that is the reward for paying attention.