I’ve been holding off publishing this as I’ve been sitting on an exciting announcement I wanted to wait to include: My new shirts are here! You all are the first to know before I open to the public on Friday and I’m offering free shipping for the next week to those who read this newsletter (just enter FREESHIP at checkout). You can purchase on Etsy. I hope you like them!
Now, let’s look back on last month….
In September, I set out to explore and hopefully amend my relationship to attention. It was just last year I discovered a childhood diagnosis of attention-deficit disorder. Rifling through old boxes full of artifacts like preschool paintings and half-filled middle school journals as I helped my mom move into a new place, I found paperwork dated back to 20 or so years ago. There it was, the confirmation of something I had long suspected. I’ve learned not to completely trust memory as truth as I’ve become more aware of how time and feeling can partner to sculpt it into new, interesting shapes- but I don’t recall the diagnosis being explained to me and never received medication, so this was still somewhat news to me.
The medical diagnosis itself was less interesting than the sense of validation I felt that the struggles I came (and still come) up against in various areas of life could be attributed, at least in part, to this way that my mind works. Still, there’s a part of me that’s glad I didn’t wrestle with an extra label growing up. Instead, I wrestled with the tendencies that live under the ADD umbrella that I fell into and the way they rubbed up against the societal expectations that they, and I, were at odds with.
It’s not that I haven’t felt bound, blocked and stunted by my own brain- oh, have I- but the more I reflect, the more the richness of my inner world and imagination seem stitched to this “disorder”. I can only speak for myself; I completely get why many are grateful for a diagnosis and medication that have been essential to their functioning. Though, I find myself curious about what gifts this way of being has unearthed, how it’s contributed to the structure of me and the rhythm of my life being left to run it’s natural course into my adulthood.
I also reject this notion of having a deficit of attention. From my perspective, I have plenty of attention! Through experience, I can now recognize with more ease the environments and modes of information intake that both stimulate and hold my focus. I’m also aware of what splinters my attention, leaving my mind scattered in dozens of places that are not here, rendering in me a temporary incompetence to meet the moment I’m in and the world that lives inside it. One of the most powerful in throwing me off kilter is social media. Actually, before I discovered this old diagnosis I wondered if I wasn’t born with this neurodivergence, perhaps it had been technologically induced.
In my quest to ease off the screen and explore where my attention takes me when I extricate myself from the endless scroll, a couple things happened. For one, my creativity flourished. French philosopher Simone Weil said, “Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”, and writer Melissa Pritchard calls art “…a form of active prayer.” There is so much truth in these statements. When there are constant interruptions to the tasks or processes that require flow in our lives, of course our relationship to that work, and the work itself, will be affected.
I can see in this painting I completed in September- my largest watercolor yet at 22x30in.- just how apparent the benefit of an absence of interruption was for me. Time opened up, and in it’s spaciousness, I discovered more patience. I found there to be more room for and greater commitment to detail. There are necessary moments of pause required to make decisions as a painting evolves past what the painter has planned, and I felt I could sit in them without the urge to rush. I could be more intentional. I could look at the image coming together before me and really see.
When the painting was complete, I could rest in it’s completion. This time, I can’t locate something I would change or fix. I stand by the artistic choices I made. This isn’t always the case and I attribute that to the “unmixed attention” Simone Weil described. When we’re not operating on autopilot and trying to multitask a dozen things, our capacity to attend to the one thing we really value and mean to prioritize greatly increases.
I noticed this increase in capacity in other areas, too. I had more time to read and so much more interest in reading. There are infinite essays, links to articles, and life updates from friends and accounts I follow on social media. I gain very much from these and genuinely value access to them, but the sheer amount that the newsfeed offers up and at such a constant rate is, in all truth, excessive. It’s not surprising that this would take up a bulk of my energy for reading, leaving my attention drained at the end of the day when I usually allocate time for a book. The issue here being, I happen to value books, too! It is an honor to hold a writer’s work in my hands and discover the story they toiled years to bring forth to an audience. This sort of work deserves that “unmixed attention” too, and I felt more in integrity with this value of mine being able to offer it.
I could go on and on. My house was cleaner, as I filled the empty, “What should I do now?” spaces with tidying it. My mind was more clear, creating a welcoming environment for emotions to make their way through; something I was grateful for when I met challenging situations, or met detours in plans. But to shift gears from what I took away to improve my attention (social media), I also had the privilege of adding something in: travel!
Travel, as an experience that takes us out of our immediate environment, regular routines, duties and usually, frame of mind, is a delicious antidote to distraction. When we go somewhere new, especially to a place where the time zone, terrain, cuisine, language and culture are significant departures from our own, we have to turn our awareness on and engage in a much deeper way. We’re not making automatic choices anymore, instead tapping into sensation to enter the flow of that place. As a matter of fact, I find that on most trips- local or far-flung- I have no trouble staying off my phone because of the energy required to take in a new forest, town, or country.
The unfamiliar captivates.
I feel my senses turn all the way on. At our first meal off the airplane, I’m listening in on a Catalan conversation to hear the way the language dances off the speaker’s tongue, watching courses come out to the family just inside the restaurant’s window to learn which order the food and drink are meant to be taken in, ordering something off the menu I can’t find a translation for and when it comes out, being delighted by the preparation of leeks it turns out to be: sweet and rich, absolutely swimming in a smooth, bright green and slightly bitter olive oil.
When we travel, we notice. We notice things that are a given back home and things we may take for granted. We notice what’s different, too. It wakes us up. The chatty Monk parakeets we weren’t expecting to see in Spain. The psychedelic display of color and gaunt faces sculpted in stone at architect Gaudi’s wildly impressive cathedral, Sagrada Familia. The varying preparations of vermouth at each tapas bar, delicious and different each time. All the noticing demands our attention. A screen couldn’t hold a candle.
And then, I come back home. I log back on.
Home where I know what to expect at each turn of my neighborhood’s streets. I know when to expect the construction site across from me to turn on their machinery in the morning. I know right where to find the light switch in my bathroom when the house is dark. I know what’s in the cupboard and what’s on rotation for lunch. All of this knowing, this familiarity, changes the way I move through my life. It’s a comfort and it can feel like a crutch. I don’t really have to be as aware and mindful, it’s easy enough to get by without that…
But we have to find a way to bring that self into our every day if we want an embodied and intentional life, and I think these breaks help. Even though I know my neighborhood, I couldn’t have predicted I’d see the dragonfly catching the light just the way it did so it glinted gold yesterday afternoon. Even though I’m back on Instagram, my sense of the world is stretched wide again. I’m determined not to let it shrink.
I think when I am distracted, maybe I could see it as simply being out of tune. Perhaps we are instruments that can be adjusted to receiving life, to letting it in, in a certain way. In the past month, I attuned by adding and taking away. What would you need a little less of and a little more of to feel a greater sense of harmony; to call your attention back?
With Love,
Jess