Commonplace book, pg. 4 — On paying attention

The tagline of The Joggled Mind is “Pay Attention.” Dr Essai’s commonplace book reflects his interest in attentiveness.

Susan Sontag, writer and critic

It's all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

Anne Lamott, writer

Being at all, living, is a miracle, and, note to self, attention must be paid.

Barry Lopez, writer and naturalist

Perhaps the first rule of everything we endeavor to do is to pay attention.

To pay attention is to expose ourselves to here and now and feel all of our tuning forks start to vibrate. That can be uncomfortable. It can be scary and exhausting. But there is this: love and beauty live in the present. When we drift off—not without reason do we say that our minds wander—we miss the love and we miss the beauty. 

When we manage to still our manic selves, the full-color, full-volume universe just on the other side of our corneas and eardrums lights us up. The armatures we have within us begin to turn and produce the voltage from which good things come. Attention transmutes what most of us miss into something far richer. Without attention, there would be no art.

Guy Davenport, critic

Art is always the replacement of indifference by attention.

Jane Hirshfield, poet and scholar

Intelligence and receptivity are connected—human meaning is made by seeing into what is.

Robert Adams, photographer

I am asked with surprising frequency, “How do you know where to make pictures?” To the extent there is a rule, the answer is that it is usually where you stop long enough.

But it’s not that easy. Most of us are not naturally good at it. Plus that digital information superhighway that was supposed to make us the most sapient Homo sapiens ever mostly works against us.

J.A. Baker, author

The hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.

Annie Dillard, author

Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won’t see it. It is, as Ruskin says, “not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.”

 Herbert Simon, economist and cognitive scientist

What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

All true, but in the end, so what? As Dr Essai would tell his writing students when they complained about how hard it is to write well, “Yeah, it is hard. But if everybody could do it, where would that leave us?”

By unfathomable luck, the universe has seen fit to make us sentient and creative and just smart enough to make something from the wonder that comes to us every day, if we make the effort. 

Mark Strand, poet

We're only here for a short while. And I think it's such a lucky accident, having been born, that we're almost obliged to pay attention.

Mary Oliver, poet

Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.

Yes.