Attention: The essay series formerly called One Small Thing would like to become a narrative about attention! And who am I to deny a handful of essays what they ask?
Why attention? So many reasons. For one, I work in a university, where compared to twenty years ago, anecdotally and unscientifically, I see more trains of thought derailed, more schemes cut short, more ambitions stunted. Why? When I ask students if the internet or a smartphone has something to do with it, no one yet has answered, “No, that’s not it.” More often, the answer is, “Yes, that , and also — . ”1
Students are not the only ones succumbing to the nefarious enchantment of flashing pixels. Gadgets offer all of us forgetfulness. Every generation has its opium, and every generation has sufferings it would like to forget. Odysseus plugged his ears against the Sirens. The Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman carried Dorothy and Toto out of the poppy field. When the epic of this generation is written, someone will know the charm to keep us from pixellating away our precious free will.
Until then, The Attention Chronicles will take a crack at the problem, story style. It might amount to nothing, but I’d rather try and fail than disappear into my keyboard and wave at you from Tron’s side (or inside The Matrix, if you prefer).
The plan is for small, focused essays to start a drip-line of attention that only a human can give. Essays will center on one of the following stepping stones in this pathway:
Attention
Habit & Ritual
Soil & Furniture
Invitation
And these four stones will lead to —> Home.
Home is the aspiration, a place where we can experience rest and renewal without malicious bedazzlement. Sometimes we’ll take the four paving stones in order; other times we’ll mix them up or circle back. The line will not be straight. In fact, it may need to get a little dodgy and sly to outwit the flesh-eating gadgets and news feed and whatever besets.
I expect to follow the old structure of One Small Thing: an odd fact, followed by a story.
Here’s a sample:
I. Tuning In, Tuning Out
There is a theory about visual attention called selective tuning. According to this theory, when we give our attention to a visual stimulus, we block out other visual stimuli immediately surrounding the target. Beyond the blocked area, we gather stimuli again.2
Let’s say a chestnut falls from a tree in front of me and splits open. I notice the smooth brown nut tucked safely in its spiny case. My peripheral vision takes in which neighbor’s house I’m passing, how thick is the trunk, how tall the tree, and whether the yard is tidy or overgrown.
Later, coming back from my walk, in front of the same house I notice the orange and blue Nerf dart left out in the weather on the sidewalk, with all the leaf litter and the fallen chestnuts. I wonder how I missed it the first time. It seems so obvious. Somewhere nearby must be my original chestnut, but this time it escapes my attention.
I wonder if attention always blots out something this way. Is that the allure of losing ourselves in activities we don’t actually care about? Does an “inhibitory annulus” around the spotlight of attention suppress what we do not feel ready to face: a responsibility, a memory, a choice?
II. The Story
It doesn’t matter what I was avoiding, but let’s just say I was grateful for the walks to the bus stop in the frigid hour before the winter dawn.
When my firstborn advanced from the local elementary school to the junior high across town, he became a bus rider.
I walked with him at first to make sure we had the right time and location for the stop. We did.
I kept walking with him to carry his bulky trumpet case while he lugged the shoulder bag, lunchbox, water bottle, PE bag, and school laptop — all the requisite supplies.
I kept walking with him as the weeks passed and he streamlined his load because that’s the way we started the year. No one needed to say it, but we all needed some new routines we could count on.
I kept walking after the bus pulled away because by then the black sky was just a little less black — not yet blue, not yet streaked with light. Just behind the eastern hills, someone opened a door to let the cat out. Nothing more. Just a little crack in the door of the night sky. Just a little suggestion of darker shapes up there where clouds must be.
Clouds maybe in the shape of a stealthy cat.
I kept going up the hill, through the neighborhoods, and down again.
The technician in the overhead lighting booth turned the lumens up gradually, every day, right on time. I found the tech to be a person of impeccable habits.
I took inordinate pleasure in the smallest things: the lacy edges where ice puddles thinned, green yucca leaves stiffly bearing their weight of snow, drops of moisture frozen before they fell from pine needles, a crack in the pavement shaped like an arrow. Briefly, while I walked with such full and deliberate attention, the day’s troubles retreated, as though the stars of the hour were in a spotlight, and the cares just beyond the light were in the deepest shadows, out of sight.
I was on my way down the hill, the sky now pale blue and streaked with dawn, when I noticed one small cloud wrapped around the roof of a single house, no others like it. Edged in soft yellow, the cloud caught the ball of pink and gold lobbed up from behind the hills, and a rose color seeped into its fibers and deepened.
Next moment, the dull windows of the house lit up with white luminescence, like the pearly inside of a shell.
I thought: The people in the house have no idea. How could you receive this benediction and not know it?
I thought: Remember that! Remember what might be happening any moment over your head.
I watched the gleaming windows, the halo of cloud, all this drama. I wondered how long I could stand in this spot, sipping the overflow while the light of morning poured itself into one house.
One house! The dawn did not multitask.
I watched with complete attention, momentarily attuned only to the dazzle of light.
Erik Hoel answers this question more definitively in “What the Heck Happened in 2012?” at his Substack, The Intrinsic Perspective.
Florin Cutzu, John K. Tsotsos, “The selective tuning model of attention: psychophysical evidence for a suppressive annulus around around an attended item,” Vision Research, Vol. 43, Issue 2, 2003, pp. 205-219, https://doi.org/10.1016/S0042-6989(02)00491-1. See also John K. Tsotsos, “Is the Selective Tuning Model of Visual Attention Still Relevant?” (2019), an abstract posted at https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1141&context=modvis. Accessed 4 October 2023.
Oh my gosh...all the time.
“I thought: The people in the house have no idea. How could you receive this benediction and not know it?”
I’m constantly trying to retune my situational awareness and antennae.
I loved this essay. I loved the way you choose your words, the visuals, the new structure, and the overall point. Keep it up you! ❤️
I read “Stolen Focus” by Johann Hari not too long ago. You’d love it.