“Hey dad. What are you doing?”

“Oh, you know, just wasting time, procrastinating doing taxes.” He explained that he was thinking about probability (his work  had to do vaguely with statistics, so this made sense), and decided to flip a coin five times to see what combination of heads-tails-heads-tails he got. Then, he did that 5-flip-series again  several more times to see what proportion of different combinations resulted.

This particular behavior was wholly unsurprising and on-brand. Maybe it was a little odd, but obviously, this kind of thing is not idiosyncratic to my dad: even at 13, I knew adulthood meant tasks that felt so painfully dull you’d rather spend hours flipping coins. At the time, I had no idea what “doing taxes” entailed, but it sounded like medieval torture. Maybe middle school isn’t that bad.

***

We were taught how to write in cursive in third grade. I remember the day clearly because it was the same day Ryan said he’d give me a dollar if I ate ants off a log on the playground. I did it–he did not give me a dollar.

To my teacher’s delight (I’m sure), I tried to learn cursive in class with my left hand, despite knowing I was right-handed. I desperately wanted to be ambidextrous.

Of course, my left-handed handwriting was terrible. It was boxy, slow, and illegible, and practicing with my left hand instead of my right meant I wasn’t learning to write correctly with my dominant hand.  I was therefore constantly reprimanded. (It was all moot anyway; I don’t think I’ve written in cursive since third grade). But I was determined. I was eight years old. My brain was at peak malleability, so I better learn a real impressive skill, lest grow up to be boring—or worse, have to learn a skill as an adult, god forbid. This was my one shot at being ambidextrous (an objectively interesting trait, obviously), and I wasn’t going to let some arbitrary pedagogical structure ruin it for me.

Ultimately, I gave up. I realized I couldn’t pay attention to developing both hands’ writing skills—it was impossible. I hated failing at something, even something as dumb as forced ambidexterity.

***

My time was running out to develop a cool skill. By seventh grade, the anxiety of choosing something—any niche, anything!—was becoming overwhelming. I gave things up  almost as soon as I started them: guitar (fingers hurt), violin (neck hurt), soccer (the girls were mean), learning to code (the boys were mean). I needed a fix, something to soothe my budding identity crisis.

Figure skating was really popular in my hometown. We were situated near a big rink, the one where the Jersey Devils practiced. I decided to give skating a shot. I loved it instantly. At the rink,  I could finally breathe. On the ice, I was lighter than the pressure of fixing my future, faster than my fears of stagnancy, on a different plane than the graveyard of failed hobbies littered all over my bedroom. Biting cold air, reddened cheeks, a few inches off the ground, floating.

I was okay at it—good enough for local competitions, then Sectionals, and eventually Nationals. I dedicated so much time to the ice, waking up at 5 AM on weekends for practice and zigzagging across the country and internationally for competitions. Naturally, there were thousands of people who were way better than me, but I genuinely didn’t care.  

My skating obsession wasn’t at all unique or special, but my perspective had softened. Really, nothing felt important in those moments except whether my outside edge was deep enough or whether I landed my Salchow without breaking my neck. I was able to pay attention to something ultimately meaningless—who cares if some run-of-the-mill skater like myself has an under-rotated Axel?—and the rest was all details. I was good enough to feel at home on the ice; the other stuff just melted away.

***

Being in your twenties in 2022 often feels like a frantic battle to keep up. Frenetically splitting your attention between apps, scrolling endlessly until the space behind your eyes feels like jelly. It’s a fair trade: I feed the apps my most sensitive personal data and in return it lobotomizes me for a blissful couple of hours. Most of it nowadays is ads. I scroll scroll scroll past an ad for a mail-order pill to “heal your gut.” Scroll scroll scroll. An ad for a virtual therapy service. Scroll scroll scroll. An ad for an article about how you’re wearing clothes wrong and aging wrong and using sunscreen wrong and eating wrong and are missing out on your “best life” because of all these horrid wrongs. Scroll scroll scroll. An ad taunts: “Are you procrastinating right now? Download this app to heal your attention span naturally!”

Attention is a finite resource. The places we direct our attention–even if we didn’t mean to land on them–are constantly picked apart and pathologized. I haven’t skated in over seven years. Somehow, I stopped paying attention to this thing that was my whole being for most of pre-adulthood life. Is that wrong? Is that normal? Is that the rhythm of growing up?

***

I spent a lot of my late teens and early twenties obsessing over decisions, terrified I’d make the wrong ones. Ultimately, I’d make de facto choices by not picking. The uncertainty of what if I choose wrong and this is the one butterfly effect choice that ruins my life became so pathologically torturous that I’d stew and stew until my indecision made a choice for me. Usually, this choice left me feeling stagnant, regretful, and empty.  

The mess of potential decisions, the opportunity to entertain every possible outcome, always felt more enticing than the present moment. I was always elsewhere, never here. Because what if elsewhere was better? The worry that I was one choice away from an entirely different life always felt far more pressing than the soft carpet under my toes, the sound of my roommates chatting in the next room, the scorch of hot tea touching my lips. Questions with no answers were ticker tape behind my eyes. What am I doing wrong?

***

My all-encompassing obsession with making the perfectly right choices for the optimized life and ritualizing any possible means to prevent failure, as it turns out, was a symptom of OCD. It’s a sneaky disorder for which I’ve since gotten treatment.

However, “worrying about the future” is about as broad as anxiety gets. Even after I put my most potent OCD symptoms behind me, I figured I could benefit from an additional push towards groundedness.

So, in my early twenties, I began attending a weekly mindfulness class. If this class had been graded, I would have earned a D or lower. The first couple weeks were excruciatingly, I’d-rather-sew-my-face-to-the-carpet boring. I think I would have had more fun at an actuarial exam. To my dismay, I learned around week 6 that this was the point: to become acquainted with, and ultimately befriend, boredom. To pay gentle attention to it, to reframe it as an opportunity to feel the full range of your physical experience in every moment of life “without judgment.” It was exhausting.

Around week 10, the instructor finally said something reasonable: “I want you to give 70% effort at most. Stop trying to give 100%. Stop forcing yourself to focus on everything at once. Mindfulness isn’t a destination or a goal, it’s a state of awareness of the moment you happen to be in. You can’t be aware of yourself if you’re obsessing over how best to be aware. Give it 70%. You’re not missing out by not giving 100%. Take the pressure off.”

Oh. My ability to create an elsewhere so elaborate, so much better than here, had outshined even my efforts to heal this very problem. I had become hyper-aware of how I was doing mindfulness “wrong,” immobilizing myself with these judgments, which were so constant I couldn’t tell where they started and ended. Instead of finding the “present moment” with ease, I was breathing through molasses and then questioning why I was left gasping for air.

“Drink your morning coffee with awareness. Stop putting toothpaste into it and then complaining that it tastes bad,” the mindfulness instructor then told us. But maybe I like my coffee minty and my toothpaste tube half-empty! Maybe I like things one-foot-in-one-foot-out, obsessing over little meaningless details just to stay occupied, splitting time, splitting attention, splitting hairs.

Bullshit. I know, I know. I know that enjoying the torture of indecision is not real, that the rituals to attempt to force a sense of certainty in an uncertain world are just distractions from reality. Reality is that the universe is indifferent to my little choices—or rather, they’re value-neutral. There’s no moral bent to choosing to play soccer or learn guitar, no valence to choosing ice skating over painting. Ambidexterity might be neat, sure, but it isn’t objectively “better.”

At its worst, if my indecision was ketamine I could have anesthetized an army. But if I’m going to pick soup over salad, it doesn’t matter how long I thought about it or the winding road I took to get to the restaurant—either way, I’m still eating soup. Sure, most decisions feel better when meticulously planned and ritualistically attended to. But in the end, they could just as readily be chosen by the flip of a coin.

I think of the ice. There isn’t a much more unforgiving place to be jumping around. In that environment, you’re constantly just one fall away from a life-altering concussion. Did I spend every practice considering new ways to avoid a fall? Or did I just skate?

of sensations which constitutes a picture.”

— Henri Matisse

“Close your eyes. Relax. Picture the moment you were being born,” the therapist posited. “Whom would you like to hold you first?” People started wandering through my mind; my brain felt overcrowded and indecisive. Hardly could I relax. Suddenly it hit me. “Nobody!” I replied with a surprising fulmination. The astringent but accommodating woman looked at me as if I were a puzzling and pixilated anomaly. “Nobody? Mother? Father? Boyfriend, for God’s sake!”  “Nobody.”

As a child I liked drawing. I was quite good at it. So good that my family, having decided I was gifted, started pushing on me to develop my talent. I threw away my painting stuff and refused drawing. Family is like a framed canvas, in which you get a square to paint. You can be creative, you can fight to widen your square or even change its shape, but already there is a frame – you cannot change the frame.

Coming back to my empty apartment from the psychotherapy, I felt I would die if I had not drawn something. In an hour, three unframed eccentric pictures appeared on my window sills, fitting quite well into the whole place. They stood there unframed for many years. But once, cuddled on my sofa, I looked at them and remembered the lady who inspired me to paint. I smiled slightly, having just decided to look for some frames for my paintings.

2007

Without thinking about you.

You and that garage apartment,

Spartan with your art and mattress.

It was a lie

Trapped in the other’s eyes.

Twirling through art museums.

Reveling in the innocence of the strange new girl

Wearing monsters on her skin.

~~~~~~~~~

Has she found you yet?

Does she make you sweat apple wine,

And stretch sober nights

Into punch drunk mornings.

Tell me, do you soak in the grandeur

Of the empty mirrored frame;

Acanthus leaves and a porcelain sink.

Have you wondered

At the generations of straightblades

Tipped between the walls.

Or has she moved?

Transfigured the memories back into someone else’s.

He only wanted Hemingway

When his eyes were swollen shut.

Terse words of bullfights,

Wars and women.

People would go around and say:

“He didn’t have a good momma.”

Before he’d learned the difference

Between “I’ll marry you”

And “I’ll marry you tomorrow.”

Elegy for My Fuji X-20

You were with me in Auvillar,

when Christophe showed me

what my eyes are for,

pointed them at a trio

of elders,

village “personnages,”

white-haired dudes. Now

I’m la viellle, l’ancienne,

senior cit, as we say

in the New World.

No grey. Aveda

takes care of that.

My Fuji, my baby,

none will give me

second sight

the way you

used to.

“Nothing lasts forever,

or even for very long,”

Marcus Aurelius said.

Son of a Bitch, what did

he know of zooming

out or in?

He covered mortality,

we’ll give him that.

Soon enough, Marcus, I’ll

shoot the breeze

with you.

What will my

view

find

then?

Alert, After Baudelaire

I am the queen of a rainy country

whose king has gone dark.

He’s a speechless river,

but I have not stopped listening.

The king left his voice somewhere else,

holds his cruelty close.

I have not stopped listening––

thunder, roar of the rising river.

More wall. His cruelty

huge and other-worldly.

The swollen river breaches the banks.

Indifferent gaze

behind the weather.

He is the sullen king of elsewhere.

I am queen where his wall is gathering.

Neil Armstrong to not even bother stepping foot

on the Negro side of the moon.       June, August

and July, three segregated summertime sisters

agreed, weather-wise. The year of our lord, 1969

was a color-line       shaped like      no shape at all.

It occurs to me now that before I left home,

hitchhiking, at age 16,            I did not know

that some things continue to go missing long after

they are found, and I didn’t realize that the physics

of throwing a baseball explains      every ounce of

racial tension in America.  But I won’t talk about that

now. Now, I want to talk about love.    As a kid, I fell

in love with the sounds of

the names of                                    baseball players:

Henry Louis “Hank” Aaron, Roger Eugene Maris,

Edward Charles “Whitey” Ford, Willie Mays, Willie

McCovey, Maury Wills, Billy Williams, Ernie Banks

and Stanley Frank Musical, the St. Louis music man.

And I can still hear the names,           baseball games

between the Temptations, the Supremes, the 4 Tops,

Motown songs       on Grandmama’s transistor radio.

“Crack,” the sound of a baseball kissing the sweet spot

of a baseball bat. “That ball’s outta here,” the always white

announcer would yell towards the Colored sport section

of my yellowed newspaper wallpapered room. And what

about the other pages in the other yellowed corners of

my unheard short radio story?          And what about

that white boy,      classmate in every class that year?

He’d never seen a “stolen base” like me. I didn’t know

I was supposed to knock him out.      I didn’t know

I was a nigger until         he called me               “Nigger”

deep in the very bottom of the 9^th.      Me at the plate,

“crack,” a walk off (case closed) home run, dead center,

solid between the hazel-blue color of       two blue eyes.

The Pender County Board of Education didn’t see it

that way in base-hit terminology.  Me, expelled completely

from the school system for life           for being the “nigger”

I did not know I was until…

Still, so be it, anyway and yes,        I know I was

raised in a small, white town of three white Jesuses,

Baptist,        Presbyterian              and Methodist,

neither of which I liked much or loved the way I

loved potato salad, fried chicken and collard greens,

picnic-style-served            after Negro church services

on Sunday, summer afternoons             in the yard of

a church without a denomination. But the choir could

sing a stairway to Heaven and part way back if you

decided to get off along the way.                       Each of

the three white Jesuses had nice white churches with

tall steeples and           summer league baseball teams,

but I never asked to pray or play.                 Perhaps

I knew way back then, if water could be segregated,

“strike zones”             could be tailor made not to fit

a Black baseball boy growing up       in White Town.

Grandmama must’ve thrown my baseball cards

in the trash the day I left, the day the Board of

Pender Country Education decided I didn’t need any

more education. Years

later, Grandmama couldn’t remember, but I still

remember the magic. Yes, even now on some lazy

weather summer days, I’m eleven years old again,

listening lightly,     my voice         opening a pack of

baseball cards, the sounds of summer.    Me, side-

stepping up and down a dirt country road,

almost swallowing the afternoon,         the chew of

stale, hard baseball card chewing gum

stuck to the bottom of somebody else’s shoes, my

clean-up-batter blues.

And then, somehow, I find what I never did lose,

piano music playing clouds across a Carolina blue

sky, reminding me              quite beautifully

as I call out the sounds           of the names I loved:

Rico Petrocelli, Jose Santiago,

Louis Aparicio,

Bill Mazeroski,            Dizzy Dean and Dizzy Trout,

Roberto Clemente                    and Tony Conigliaro.

Of course I see these people – in a sense, I see them all too well. But just as there’s looking without seeing, there is seeing without paying attention. I see their bodies, the mass that occupies the street. I also see some of their desires, for ease, for space, for entertainment. But, clearly, I do not see people. I see parts. I see functions and impediments. My irritation turns to sadness because I realise that, in this way, I have locked myself into my own little world, a sorry solipsistic space where my own desires and goals, the same drives which locked me in it, wither meaninglessly without air.

To realise that something other than oneself is real, wrote the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, is extremely difficult. She called this realisation love. Love (understood as eros: love for reality) fuels attention. Attention is what gives us vision beyond seeing, knowledge beyond the immediately visible.

When I am overcome by irritation at the people blocking my way, I fail to see something which is there, and obvious: that other people have interests like me, goals like me. Maybe they’re tired and hence walk slowly, maybe they’re anxious and hence walk unpredictably, or maybe they are just as blind as I am to what surrounds them. Their attention, like mine, is exhausted, under-trained, perhaps painful, and difficult to sustain.

In the novel Blindness, Jose Saramago describes an epidemic where people start losing their sight,, without apparent cause. Saramago wrote the book in 1995, some time before we became so completely used to the technologies that, many now worry, are making it even easier for us not to see. Or, rather, technologies that enable us to see only what we choose to see at that moment, each hit and swipe determining what will satisfy our desires and curiosity in the next minute or hour. Or, again, to see what someone else has decided will make us better consumers, more targeted buyers, or, yet more chillingly, more polarised voters. Welcome, as Tim Wu has argued, to the attention economy.

Inattentiveness, manipulated attention, instrumentalized focus, are so, so easy. To attend, forcing ourselves out of the dream world we keep creating, is both wonder and toil. Attention, as French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil wrote, is nothing short of a miracle. Not just because truly, fully attending is hard, going against our natural tendencies for self-gratification and ease. But, more interestingly, because attention can reveal the reality of things, that which we rarely see because it requires a keen, devoted, passionate, disinterested, unhurried gaze - and when we see it (whether it’s a leaf, the face of a friend, the paw of a cat, a rock, a painting by Miró), we’re transformed.  

This may simultaneously sound mystical and perfectly ordinary . That’s the kind of mysticism I like. And I bet any of you has experienced that kind of keen, devoted, passionate, disinterested, unhurried gaze – that attention – perhaps without realising, because here’s another beautiful thing about attention: it’s not about you. When we are immersed in whatever we are attending to, we forget ourselves. And strangely enough for creatures whose primary goals seems to be for self-preservation and self-gratification, there are few things as wonderful as forgetting ourselves. That’s why attention is so difficult and yet so worthwhile.

Attention is what connects us to the world outside of ourselves: There is a peculiar ignorance about attention, an ignorance of the best kind. To attend is to admit the reality outside ourselves, our own limits, and the bridge between us. To remain in that moment of unknowing and taking it for what it is allows for a revelation, or perception if you prefer, of what we couldn’t invent or make up.

Attention has a special relationship not only to self and knowledge, but also to time. Weil  writes that attention is a form of waiting (the French word attendre translates both as ‘to attend’ and ‘to wait’). Here’s another thing I don’t do very much – waiting. In my actions and thoughts, my schedule and filling my ignorance , I seek and grasp, and then the world whizzes by while I take in little of what is important. I don’t know what this is all for. Is it merely a blind submissiveness to the way one is supposed to live these days? Whatever the reason for it, it leaves me desperately empty. And having this awareness, knowing that I’m missing most of what the world around me offers in impatient inattentiveness only makes it more bitter. In the past months, I have often travelled by train for an hour from Prague to Pardubice, in the Czech Republic. Never once have I looked at the landscape. Mostly I work. Sometimes I read. Sometimes I let my gaze wander outside, preoccupied with some thought, and really see nothing. I couldn’t tell you whether the houses have red brick roofs, nor whether there are animals grazing in the fields, or whether the landscape is dry or full of trees. You will say, I attended to something else. Something I chose to attend to, for the sake of productivity, accomplishment, or ticking boxes in my diary. But getting things done is not driven by the patient attentiveness that Weil was talking about, if we take her word as I think we have reason to. And always choosing one’s objects of attention leaves one bereft, once again, of the vast reality that one has not chosen but is there and, much like that Czech landscape, one doesn’t even know what it is and what it looks like.

Unlike choosing, wanting, controlling, attention is being suspended. When we attend, we have not yet arrived anywhere. But we have already departed a little from ourselves. We have left our comfortable boredom and, perhaps gingerly, taken a step forward – picture a rope stretched out from rock to rock. It’s exhilarating and frightening. So we may wish to step back, into the habitual, controlled space from which our attention somehow emerged. Attention can be, for many of us, very uncomfortable: the suspension of our mind, the emptiness of our knowledge, the impotence of our agency. For if you take seriously the fact that we attend to what we do not yet know or understand, then it becomes clear that the objects of our attention are irreducibly other to us, and in being other, they are beyond our control. We may manipulate them, capture them, consume them, but what they are – that which attention can reveal – is not, not at all, can never be, up to us.

But if we stay – if we accept this state, the discomfort that many of us may feel, and resist the natural urge of running back, snapping out of attention – we truly enter the state of attention, where we forget that we are attending, and we enter a new time, not that of waiting, but of timelessness. Then attention becomes effortless, and what it reveals is revealed continuously, in a flux that feels obvious, as if nothing else made sense. Attention makes us forget we are attending, forget ourselves as the ones attending, and then, too, forget the time in which we are attending, the before and the after. Full attention is a room with no walls, doors, or windows.

As a connector between me and you, between me or you and the rest of the world, attention is the capacity to dissolve the familiar dichotomies that, in this very formulation, return. Me and you, me and the world, here and there, active and passive, inside and outside. When, in attending, we enter the third space, the space between, we are not really between, but somewhere else entirely. All it took was to step outside ourselves and move towards the world, but now we do not see the good old self growing smaller behind us, nor the vast astonishing world coming into shape ahead of us. We are in both, and in neither. In the space of attention, we are the self and the world at once.

If we think about it this way, we will no longer be surprised that a single moment of attention can move people to any action. It can move us to leave our job, marry someone, save a life, hug a friend. Nor will we be surprised that a moment of attention can move us to tears, because for the first time we see a flower, a place, a fly, or a cup.

If I am right that attention, as I have been describing it, does not often come easily to us, then we may need teachers. Some of the best teachers of attention, I believe, are non-human animals. Often, when I walk down the street, I meet the gazes of dogs, completely present, while their human companions are absorbed elsewhere. But the dogs are there, and when we see each other, there is no need for understanding, for we are both in that space, at that time, recognising the life in the other.

My main teacher, however, is a cat. Charles Bukowski concluded the poem ‘My Cats’ with the line ‘they are my teachers’ and I bet attention is at least one of the subjects that his cats instructed him in. My teacher is called Jean, and whenever I walk past the room where she’s sitting, she calls me in for a cuddle. Sometimes I think I don’t have time. At others, I stop and pet her briefly, immersed in thoughts of what I should do next, or rehearsing another conversation or another argument in my mind. If I accept the invitation, but find myself being only physically present, I scold myself for wasting that time we have together. Then I try to be there attentively, and become  impatient because I fail again and again. But when I just walk in, and by some miracle I put my reflexivity to rest, and my attention is awakened by Jean, silencing my constant chattering, then my hand glides over her smooth black and white fur, her purring vibrates under my flesh and I vibrate with her, her enjoyment becomes my own, I am not filled with delight, I become delight. And I wonder what was so hard that I resisted it. Jean probably wonders that too, but she is far more forgiving than I am.

All of this may sound obviously true or completely mad to you, depending how you’ve experienced what I am writing about – yet I am sure you have experienced it. Talking about attention is difficult because in or after its presence all talk and writing may seem forced, superficial, or pointless. Of course, writing can occasion attention too, especially poetry, and be itself an act of attention. I wish I could give you that; instead, I’m giving you what I can: An assemblage of pointers. An invitation. An attempt at describing what it’s like and more importantly why it’s so vital that we use our attention, that we cherish it, grow it, and stay with it.

So now, let’s just try it. Find an object of attention. Anything, really anything. Something simple, like a leaf, may be easier and more surprising. Just stay with it. Be aware that, really, you don’t know this leaf. You may know a lot about it, but there’s so much you don’t know. You don’t know what this leaf is, right now: the existence of this leaf. Maybe that green never struck your eyes that way before. What made this leaf possible? What runs in its veins? Can you picture the water, nutrients, trace gasses? What’s the role of the leaf in the plant, in the house, in your life? Perhaps its shape is delicate yet irregular or broken. Whatever the leaf is like, there’s so much to discover, and you can take so much time. It’s just you and the leaf for now. That leaf is there. Really, can you see it?  That leaf is there. That’s where it all begins.

Painting constructs itself from the trickle

of time, just as puddles dry, hay gilds,

the day erodes, repeats, sinks into the earth

and the air scraping ground.

On paper, on the nerve’s outskirts, the execution

will remain. No dust on the gash’s level.

The cat, the lizard, its blood, the canvas.