Another book I've been reading is RAPT: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher (2009). Gallagher writes to turn our attention toward things that matter, because the things that matter most may not be what gets our attention first. She gives the example of going bird watching and becoming so enamored with the brilliant cardinals that quickly come into view that you tend to not see the more elusive or less colorful birds. This is exactly the scenario in my backyard. I look out the window, and, Oh look, there's a beautiful cardinal! And there's another! The cardinals tie a tether around my attention, and I never look for most of the other species of birds that are circling my yard just beyond the cardinals. Seeing the cardinals is an example of what Gallagher calls “bottom-up” attention, in which you go for the lowest hanging fruit and stop there. The problem with that approach is that there is so much more to see and learn and think about. Let’s aim instead for the “top-down” approach, urges Gallagher, and choose our focus with intention.
I’ve been watching my yard more carefully the last few days. What of the small birds that rustle the lilac bushes or that seem to shoot straight up through the blue spruce? What birds go with what song? I hear a multitude of melodies. Blue jays are another bird easy to see although they aren’t as common as cardinals. Yesterday, a blue joy slammed into my living room window, right in front of me, and bounced off as if to jealously warn me not to get too carried away aiming for sightings of birds of a more subtle variety.
Of course Gallagher’s goal is not to warn us about thinking too narrowly about birds but rather to consider carefully the thoughts that we too easily allow to capture and predominate our thinking. Given all that's gone on this past year, in the world, our nation, our cities, our personal lives, it's definitely been a year in which our attention has been grabbed and often by the bottom-up news, messages, and fears. The cardinal flits, the blue jay slams, the statistics flash, the sound byte lands and our attention is no longer our own. Pull it back, own it, I tell myself.
Gallagher writes, “Deciding what to pay attention to for this hour, day, week, or year, much less a lifetime, is a peculiarly human predicament, and your quality of life largely depend on how you handle it.”
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[Photo: Tulips seen on a morning walk. A house further down the block had much flashier tulips set in a large garden. I almost took a picture of those tulips. But then I saw these, tulips of a more humble variety, hugging the street.]