Pay attention





The phrase “pay attention!” has been badly misused by middle school teachers. Not that I blame them. Usually, they’re speaking to tweens slumped on desks with hardened gum and leftover-meatloaf-paste on the bottoms. “Pay attention” is a phrase I want to remind myself of every day. I want to tape it over my face in the mirror, to emblazon it on my best sweaters, to crystallize it into a vitamin and swallow it with 100-degree-Celsius water. I want to engrave it on the insides of my eyelids (a phrase from a WSJ article I think about a lot), so that every time I pause or close my eyes, I see the gigantic neon words floating in a soup of darkness. Paying attention is the basis of any creative work. A writer or poet pays attention to the world—to the way people talk and dress, to the way we form friendships and lose relationships, to the way a bird cuts across a coastline. An entrepreneur pays attention to what’s missing, or broken, or really, really slow. A painter pays attention to the texture of a tablecloth, the slant of light, the shoulder blade shifting in a backwards glance. A designer pays attention to details. “Care a lot about the little things and the big things will follow." (Quote at bottom of post.) Paying attention feels like serendipity.

On a more personal note, paying attention is my thesis for why I write. The moment I realized this actually happened very clearly. I was watching the movie Lady Bird on a plane ride. In one scene, Lady Bird meets with her Catholic high school’s principal, Sister Sarah, to discuss her college application essays. Lady Bird hates Sacramento, and the whole movie basically centers around her wild desire to finally leave. But at their meeting, Sister Sarah says:



“It is clear that you love Sacramento.”



Lady Bird is disbelieving, to say the least. She responds, “I guess I pay attention.”



“Don’t you think they’re the same thing? Love and attention?” Sister Sarah replies.

I remember pausing the scene and rewatching it. Paying attention is a form of love. For me, writing felt like an escape and a way of transfiguring negative experiences. Yet it was also paying closer attention to the world, which was a form of love. Writing is my way of paying attention. (I later gave an impromptu dinner speech focused entirely on this one quote. Needless to say, the speech was filled with many repetitions of “so, like, basically" and being on the verge of tears while people ate their herb-crusted salmon.)

Besides the Lady Bird quote, here are some of my favorite reminders to pay attention. Some other writers I admire who write about this topic: Austin Kleon (who wrote Steal Like an Artist), Rob Walker (who wrote The Art of Noticing), and Jenny Odell (who wrote How To Do Nothing, an article and a book).

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When people look slowly, they make discoveries. If you want to change your life, change what you pay attention to. “We give things meaning by paying attention to them,” Jessa Crispin writes, “and so moving your attention from one thing to another can absolutely change your life.

--From Keep Going by Austin Kleon. The idea of looking slowly is an

interesting perspective: it’s impossible to pay attention “quickly.” The word

itself seems to imply slowness and noticing details with patience.

If all you do is keep your head down and work hard, then you will be so blindered by your work that you will never be able to look around and see what opportunities are out there. If you are always too busy to do anything but what you’re working on right now, then you will miss the random things that will change your life.

--From Fortune Favors by Chris Peterson in the MIT Admissions Blog.

Keep your eyes wide open when you walk through a city, or through a room.

--Dieter Rams quote from the documentary Rams by Gary Hustwit. I love

the implicit comparison of a room to a city, and the phrase "keep your eyes

wide open," which reminds me something similar my mom says in

Chinese: 睁大你的眼睛.

She changed my vision forever. Wherever she would go, she would take a minute to look around her. You’d see her at the brasserie on the corner and she would look at the table, at the chairs, at how the wood was aging.

--From an Agnés Varda obituary written by JR. I love the line: "she would

look at how the wood was aging." Such a unexpected, specific, and

beautiful detail. You can read my notes on their documentary Faces, Places

here. The documentary is a journey in paying attention.

Any act of pure perception is a feat, and if you don’t believe it, try it sometime.

--From All The King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren. It’s a little hard to

understand out of context. By “pure perception,” the author means

perceiving things as they really are, without emotion or personal

distortions. This is actually really difficult—my inner voice constantly

comments or makes elaborations on what I perceive. I will take this one window with its sooty maps and scratches so that my dreams will remember one another and so that my eyes will not become blinded by the new world. --From a crazy James Tate poem. A reminder to not be blinded by material

things and success in "the new world," and to search for a space where

“dreams will remember one another.”

The more ideas we encounter and are interested in, the more likely we are to be enlightened thinkers

--From a Quartz article called physics can explain human innovation and 

 enlightenment. Related to Carol Dweck’s growth mindset theory, maybe

paying attention is also about being open to growth?

Some people only see color and more color. The great thing is what happens between colors.

--From The Art Spirit by Robert Henri. Loosely-related quote on paying

attention to change and fluidity rather than viewing events as isolated

compartments.



Though it seems, at first, like an art of speaking, poetry is an art of listening. The poet trains to hear clearly and, as much as possible, without interruption, the voice of the mind, the voice that gathers, packs with meaning, and unpacks the language the poet knows. It can take a long time to learn to let this voice speak without getting in its way.

--From We Begin in Gladness by Craig Morgan Teicher.

Our brain operates more on pattern recognition than logic.

--From Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin To Munger by Peter Bevelin. How

do we find patterns? By paying attention.

Noticing rather than just being noticed, seeing rather than just being seen.

--I don’t remember where I got this fragment. But it’s a great reminder

whenever I get anxious about followers or social media. I am here to see

and notice rather than just to be seen and "validated."

What you are looking for is who is looking.

--I don’t know where I saw this. (Google attributes it to St. Francis of

Assisi? Who I certainly have never read.) It’s a reminder to look for other

people who are also paying attention. Is that you?! How can I reach out?

Concentrating, focusing. [...] Think about what the word means. It means gathering yourself together into a single point rather than letting yourself be dispersed everywhere into a cloud of electronic and social input.

--From a speech “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz. This is

actually an interesting counterpoint to paying attention. Although the

thesis of paying attention is the opposite of “distraction,” paying attention

isn’t exactly focusing in ”one point” in the way Deresiewicz talks about it.

Paying attention still needs to be balanced by deep work, without attention

to surroundings.

Care a lot about the little things and the big things will follow.

--From a Sequoia interview with Jason Boehmig.



And a bonus from Amy Krouse Rosenthal in Austin Kleon's blog;

Pay attention to what you pay attention to.