attention/affection
I'm writing this from the edge of a pond in upstate NY, where I'm spending 5 days on a farm in a self-guided residency. I came for the light and the space and the sheep. Mostly I came for the flowers.
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What I’m really supposed to be doing here is writing, or rather editing — I have a revision due to my editor and I am working, I am, but also I’m thinking about attention. How attention drifts, which is really to how say affection drifts. How the things we pay attention to are really the things for which we feel a fondness, or affinity. How strange it is to pay attention to your own attention, after so long having it co-opted by necessity, by a kid who wants to pinch your nipple with one hand while she has the other in her mouth and is using her free hand to pick your nose. When that is happening, it’s hard, weirdly, to pay attention to anything else.
My novel (!!) has two protagonists but for a long time I have vastly preferred one over the other, felt annoyed when I had to deal with W's chapters. One character is all action and movement and the other is stasis and frustration and as I wrote I would clench my teeth and think, GET ON WITH IT. Like, DO SOMETHING already! Why are you still looking at that stupid tree? Lately, though, I’ve felt protective of him, of his space and his needs. I’ve wanted to sit with him on the river bank, let him run his hands through the yellow marsh lilies. I’ve been lingering in his chapters and trying to figure out what it is he really wants, what all this waiting has made of him, what it would be like to attend to the thing in front of you, and then to give yourself the space to think, carefully, about what might be next.
On the farm, I wake to the sound of the other residents and staff as they putter around the communal kitchen. I eat breakfast outside while reading a book. I test how I feel, follow a strange internal rhythm, one I haven’t listened to in a long while, one I thought might have gone quiet. I felt like getting in the car so I did, felt like walking over that footbridge so I did, felt like walking up that hill to see the great oak that oops, turns out was felled by a storm in 2015, and oops, now I'm lost in the woods and you know, probably would have been a good idea to wear something other than sandals but we'll figure it out, we'll come around again.
This is, of course, truly the ultimate in luxury. The time and space to listen to what your body wants to pay attention to. A partner who is taking care of the kids, a breast pump, a book advance that allowed me to feel like I could justify this. But it’s reclamation, isn’t it, this process? It’s maybe a little bit radical. And it’s useful, because once we start paying attention, we realize how little we’ve been paying attention at all.
Self Soothing
Nothing about the above is unique, of course, and much is inspired by this interview between Ezra Klein and PJ Vogt which, to be frank, is a bit aggressively…what’s the word…male? Still, there are some useful reminders about how our life is the sum of what we pay attention to, and simply hearing others debate this own fact and how it emerges in their own lives inspired a lot of reflection.
I’m also listening to Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari, which, again - men! - but he does aim the bullet fully at big tech rather than at individual action, which I appreciate. I turned off Screen Time on my phone a year or so ago because I was irate that my phone was scolding me for doing exactly what it wants me to do — in other words, Apple/Google/the overloads are actively trying to hook me and then have the gall to yell at me for not being able to resist? No thank you.
This list is suspiciously male this week! What’s going on here? If you follow me on Instagram (antithetical to the above, I know), you’ll already have heard me crowing about North Woods, but god, this book. It’s reminiscent of the best of David Mitchell, to me, the ventriloquist act of inhabiting so many different voices, and Mason does fascinating work with scale, too. It is, truthfully, also a book about attention, and I loved it dearly.