Slowing Down and Paying Attention
Posted by Anna Debenham on February 5, 2021
Over the past couple weeks I’ve felt like a teenager who is having a growth spurt. It feels quite uncomfortable, and even painful at times, but ultimately I know it’s a good thing. As The Insight Alliance has grown over the past few years I’ve had a tendency to say 'yes' to most things. Motivated by curiosity and wanting to help people, everything felt interesting and worthwhile.
With the Understanding of the Mind we teach at The Insight Alliance, I tend to be way more present and have a clearer state of mind than I used to. This can lead to me taking more on. I have less thinking about things, so why not? It’s all an experiment anyway. But recently something is waking up in me that feels new, or more evolved at least.
I’m learning how to say 'no'. And I’m listening more to the quiet voice inside that is saying s.l.o.w d.o.w.n. Although this voice hasn’t been all that quiet recently. In fact, the last few days it’s been hitting me over the head with a 2 x 4. Hence the uncomfortable growth spurt analogy. All this brings up lots of feelings, and not all of them comfy. But I’m listening.
Saying 'yes!' to things comes easily when life offers so much opportunity. But saying 'no', I wouldn’t say it’s harder, just that no hasn’t come out of my mouth as much. Till now. I’m finding it so refreshing. What I’m realizing is saying 'no', or at least ‘not now’, offers me the gift of more presence and focus on what actually needs my attention in the moment.
As the writer Howard Rheingold says: “Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.”
I feel like I’m being woken up or shaken up to pay attention to where I pay attention.
An opinion piece in the New York Times by Charlie Warzel, “I Talked to the Cassandra of The Internet Age”, spoke to this notion of attention so clearly. The author interviewed Mr. Goldhaber talking about the ‘Attention Economy’ and this bit grabbed me:
“Attention is a bit like the air we breathe. It’s vital but largely invisible, and thus we don’t think about it very much unless, of course, it becomes scarce. It feels as if our attention has become polluted. We subsist on it, but the quality has been diminished.”
It feels like all the noise in politics, COVID and just life over the past year, and especially few months, has polluted our attention. And for me, all the business of co-leading a non-profit can shift my focus from the present moment. From what’s right here in the stillness of my own mind, to the stuff that seems to always be on my list of to-do’s.
I can now begin to see more clearly that where I come from inside myself makes so much difference to the quality of my day to day goings on. This includes all the groups we teach each week, to teacher training, to grant reviews, to all the people we support after release.
What is the feeling I’m coming from as I go about my day? Is it from the stillness within, where my attention is unwavering, or from the cluttered or ‘polluted’ attention of having a lot on my mind?
I feel so grateful for this wisdom, the capacity for awareness that we all have to notice what’s going on and course correct when necessary. Mavis Karn, a colleague, calls it our Divine Engineering (Here’s an interview I did with her).
“We can observe ourselves creating personal drama, catch it and decide whether we want to keep doing that or not. That’s an amazing app! We think our phones are so great, but nothing compared to how we’re made. We can climb up into the cheap seats and get some popcorn and watch ourselves making a mess and interrupt it. How cool is that?”
I love the way Mavis says that.
I've felt a bit like that the past couple weeks. I observed what was brewing in me and paid attention. Like everyone else I have the ability to interrupt myself creating drama and think, "Nahhhh, not now. Not today." I just need to be still and see the next right step. And that’s what I’m doing. Seeing the next right step.
