How to pay attention





When I was a kid focus came naturally. I spent hours digging through the soil in my backyard looking for earthworms, lifting up their cool wriggling bodies when I found them. A spiderweb shiny with water after the rain could stop me in my tracks. The world felt porous and open; summer vacation seemed like it lasted for years. Though I understood objectively that time was moving forward, it seemed like my life in the present was all that existed: reading on the couch in the little white house where we lived with my grandparents, folding hundreds of dumplings on the weekend, trudging up the hill to school with my bright red Herschel backpack.



Lately I've been remembering the way I paid attention when I was in elementary school, the way the barrier between me and the world felt almost non-existent. I've been reading more about mindfulness this year, and for me the practice of being mindful is all about two things: 1) paying total attention to your present surroundings instead of being stuck in your head, and 2) letting experiences pass through you. I think I was naturally good at both when I was approximately seven years old, and I somehow unlearned it over the years. Now I'm trying to relearn.



Ava in second grade never thought about the past because she basically had no past. Ava in second grade fantasized about the future ("I'm going to be an astronaut! I'm going to be a superhero!") but the future was so unreal to her that she couldn't really conceptualize it in a serious way. My life back then wasn't objectively interesting, but it was interesting because I paid total attention to it. Whenever I read a book, I was so intently focused on the story that my mom could scream my name from the kitchen and I couldn't hear her. When my family went camping I was fascinated by the squirrels scuttling up the big pine trees and the mid-afternoon light changing as clouds shifted overhead. Everything that happened to me, I was completely present for.



As an adult, I lost the knack of being immersed. When we watched a movie before bed, half the time I'd be browsing Reddit or Instagram on my phone; even when I was writing I would take breaks to worry about the quality of my writing or open another tab to browse backpacks on Ebay or scold myself for not being more productive. Focus was something I forced myself to do in order to get things done, but rarely my natural state of being.



Eventually I realized that I was happier when I paid attention: interesting details suddenly materialized out of the vague fog of my day. The sun on the back of my arms felt pleasurable. I noticed all sorts of nice things about the physical world, about the people around me, that I had been blind to before. So I started trying to bring myself back to the world of my childhood, rich and slow, overloaded with sensory detail, effortlessly engaging even though it contained no restaurants, no parties, none of the things that I find interesting as an adult.



I'm relearning again that things are always interesting if we attend to them. Attention, to me, means submitting totally to the present moment: no runaway trains of thought, no fixating on memories, no frenetically plotting the future. Surrendering to experience instead of trying to control it in your head. Most of us are always trying to control things in our heads: I can't tell you the number of times I wasn't present in a conversation because I was worrying about whether I had just said something stupid, whether there was food on my face, what question to ask next. I have this distinct memory a few years ago of being in Hong Kong at a dimsum place with my best friend, eating the most delicious potstickers, and being totally miserable in that beautiful city because I was fighting with my boyfriend and he hadn't texted me back. I was busy thinking, analyzing, reframing, trying to intellectualize everything I possibly could in an attempt to control my surroundings. But I've come to believe that so much of that is just noise: it doesn't lead to any particularly good insights, it doesn't actually help me change the situation, and it definitely makes me less happy.



I think we can use the Pareto Principle for thinking: 20% of the time you'll have a good thought or insight that's worth writing down and actually helps you change something about your life. 80% of the time whatever agonizing you're doing is completely useless. Imagine if you just let that 80% go.



Personally, I'm most joyful when I'm in the flow of the present, paying complete attention to whatever I'm writing or reading, paying attention to whomever is talking to me. I feel more peaceful, and I actually am more productive: I get more done because I'm not thinking about getting things done instead of doing them. So I try mostly to stay in flow, which brings me to the second thing I'm relearning: how to let experiences pass through me.

When you get into a state of focused attention, you don't stably remain there forever. There are always things that disrupt it: your parents call you and say something snippy over the phone, you have an argument with a friend that makes you feel terrible, a stranger makes a random remark that hits on some particular insecurity, your boyfriend gets mad at you... This wouldn't happen in a monastery, but it's impossible to live in the real world and not get derailed. You can get into a state of feeling super peaceful and in flow with the world, and then the next week you're suddenly back to being neurotic or anxious because someone did something that threw you for a loop.



This is inevitable. If you want to stay in flow, you have to let things pass through you. By which I mean: if a friend says something that upsets me, my first instinct is naturally to protect my ego. I get angry at the friend and try to ensure they won't say something that makes me sad again. I analyze; I close myself off. I might even alter my life so that I'm not hurt in the same way again. But that entire chain of behavior is enormously disruptive to paying attention, because all of a sudden all of your mental energy is focused on protecting and defending your ego. You're trying to control the environment around you so you don't get hurt. This can happen with good experiences too: say you meet someone and you really really like them. She makes you feel special. Then on the fourth date, she says “Sorry, I like you but I'm just not over my ex-boyfriend." It feels terrible, doesn't it? You start replaying the past, wishing that you could feel the same warmth and intimacy again, wondering what you did wrong. Maybe next time you meet someone you really like you're already nervous, worried on every date that this will be the one where she breaks it off. Again: you're trying to control the world around you so you never get hurt. That's impossible. Instead of doing that, what if you just gave up on clinging onto experiences? What if you just let the next thing unfold?



I'm starting to accept that there's no way I can live in the world without occasionally feeling heartbroken, disappointed, jealous, and angry. If something unexpected happens that disrupts the flow of my day, I just let it happen to me. I try not to cling to the experience, bad or good. Instead I go back to paying attention, and usually find that the world around me remains engaging, remains rewarding, remains beautiful. It's as odd and violently interesting as it was when I was seven years old.



I fight to stay in flow because when I'm paying attention I seem to always know what to do next. The oblique becomes obvious. Being interested in something leads me to the next thing, and all I have to do is keep following the connections my subconscious mind makes. All the signs are already there: the world is endlessly generative. We just have to relearn how to pay attention to it.