We Are What We Pay Attention To
“Attention is the beginning of devotion.” These are the words of American poet, Mary Oliver.
I first read “Upstream,” Oliver’s treatise on devotion, poetry, and nature, about a year ago, a time when I was grasping at any (biodegradable) straw to keep me afloat in life’s deeper waters. I was grappling with the brand of heartache that no one else can cause you; the kind that begins long after you’ve gotten used to sleeping alone. By the time I opened Oliver’s book of essays, I had cleared the “loneliness” hurtle with the least amount of grace possible (true to form), and was now just…alone. With my dog. My books. Myself.
Anyone who has ever experienced the dissolution of a long-term partnership is acquainted with this: the moment one sits oneself down (preferably with a glass of wine in hand), takes oneself by the shoulders, and is forced to ask the very seemingly simple question: Who are you?
Just you. What do you like? What makes you fall over with joy? What makes you ache? Who are the people that make you feel light when you’re around them? Why? Are you a morning person without someone else there when you rise? What are your heaviest insecurities — and what damage have they caused?
I tried to answer these questions by throwing myself into them, kinetically; I woke up to make coffee before daybreak, had nightly drinks at new bars with new people with new stories, laid an old sheet on my kitchen floor and tried to oil paint (spoiler alert: so, so incredibly bad at it), looked for myself in blurry bedrooms on Saturday nights, forced my very lazy, round dog to go hiking with me, and posted selfies on Instagram to see which version of myself people most approved of.
After months of this, I paused. Worn out, drained, and officially (blissfully) distracted from my life, I decided to take an evening of rest. Resting was dangerous — these open hours brought me closest to myself, when nothing was planned, nothing was left undone. I picked up Oliver’s book and sat on fire escape of my building, already half a bourbon in (neat, if you’re interested).
And then she said it.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion.” I sat my bourbon down. I read the line again.
Sitting there alone, surrounded by the slowing sounds of my neighborhood at dusk, I posed a new question: if my life, the sum of all my daily devotions, is built upon the foundation of “attention,” what is it that I’m giving my attention to? If I am what I pay attention to, then who am I?
For Oliver, who spent the bulk of her adult life walking through the woods surrounding her Provincetown, Massachusetts home she shared with her partner Molly Malone Cook, the answers to the “big questions” are quite small, to be looked for in the little nothings of daily life. In her poetry, Oliver pays attention to the natural world around her — the flight of wild geese, the reliable song of the redbird each morning, the gardener who tends to his roses.
As dusk darkened, I thought about where I placed my attention (deliberately or not), and furthermore, what that said about me. According the the frantic mental list I came up with: I was a reader. I was a runner. I was an introvert stretched thin. I was a constant consumer of sound — music as I walked down the sidewalk, television chatter when I was pretending to clean my apartment, podcasts when I was cooking dinner. I was a drinker of cheap wine. In addition to sound, I was a consumer of images — spending hours scrolling through Instagram pulled my brain away from the room I was in. I was an over-thinker rooted in the past — thus, I spent an alarming amount of time thinking about myself.
After pouring myself another (bigger) bourbon, I evaluated my findings: I was actively paying attention to a few things, and passively paying attention to alot of things. When I read, I actively payed attention to the words on the page. When I ran, I actively payed attention to my surroundings (mostly for fear of falling). The other items, for the most part, divided my attention; screens, earbuds, and spiraled thinking all pulled me away from the present moment; they distracted me from myself. Not coincidentally, I only considered the former two things — reading and running — to be foundational pillars of my life.
Do I want to devote myself to making so many new connections that each one is, by nature of time constraints, surface-level? Do I want to devote myself to brooding about the past (and consequently making my friends listen to me bitch, “one more time,” about the moral failings of my ex)? Do I want to devote myself to my iPhone? Or to the metrics of success defined by Instagram, Facebook, or whatever they come up with next?
Oliver’s words made me realize that I have the choice to give my attention, as well as take it away — from people, from activities, from technology. And, furthermore, that these daily decisions matter. We alone are responsible for what we devote ourselves to.
As night finally fell, I made a short list of things I would (ideally) choose to give my attention to: Books. Running. My family and friends. My partner. Evening walks with the pup. Morning coffee. My community. Bourbon (you can take the girl out of Kentucky…). French. Portuguese. Cooking. Daydreaming.
It is now my responsibility to read this list every morning; to be deliberate with my attention. To try and to fail every day, and then, to try again. And, per final instructions from Mary Oliver herself, “Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
