On noticing

our crystal cups are always waiting to be filled

I have a bone to pick with the expression paying attention. It turns out that Ezra Klein doesn’t like it either. The rub for him is that it’s phrased “as if we have a certain amount of attention in our mental wallet,” which could theoretically be better used purchasing “algebra, rather than buying gossip or jokes or daydreams.” To him, it’s silly to pretend that we can actually account for the amount we have, and planfully dole it out accordingly. We wish we had that kind of control! Personally, I don’t like it because paying attention makes what could be a gesture sound like a transaction. Spend here, conserve there: paying attention feels like we’re all haggling in an overwhelming bazaar.

In my mind, the semantics matter because the framing we give things allows us to see in new ways. The words we use are tools themselves to direct where we do or don’t pay attention, and what we do or don’t value. Where I’ll admit the phrase paying attention is sensical is that it does connote value. But what feels closer to the spirit of the thing, and the way I think we could instead be thinking about this action, is offering attention. Giving attention. I even like devoting attention, which at the risk of sounding a little “woo” implies that to notice is to be in reverence. Because when we’re seeing, really really seeing, we’re elevating what is being observed. Like a tree falling in the forest. 

D. Graham Burnett is a historian of science at Princeton University writing a book about attention. He describes being captivated by a scene in a Henry James novel, where a terminally ill woman is finally seen by a doctor. James describes the doctor placing a clear, crystal cup on the table between them. It is an allegory for his attention: I am here, the doctor is saying, to humbly receive what you have to give me, pure and unadulterated. 

@petervinther

What we devote our attention to – that we really notice – influences absolutely everything in our lives: what we learn, how optimistic we are, the connections we’re able to identify, the ideas we have, the focus and clarity we protect, even the somatic experience we have in any given moment. In order to know anything, and even to feel anything, one must first notice. So what do we lose when we are passive about our noticing? What do we gain when we pay more focused attention? 

Sometimes I wonder if mainstream meditation (like the kind promoted by Headspace and Calm) is off the mark when it encourages a focus inward, on inner quiet. An attractive voice - male or female, American or British - tries to make us comfortable with inviting nothingness into our minds. In a ten-minute meditation we may be briefly asked to notice the sounds in the room, and then our own breath, and then to try and empty our minds by acknowledging our thoughts before they slide on by into oblivion. Good intentions surely, to transform our minds into empty crystal cups. But for me, I’ve found it to be largely unhelpful framing. I sit with those instructions in the prickling, self-conscious awareness that my body and mind are a part of this world and are deeply invested in continuing to perceive it. It is effortful to resist this. But I naturally become a crystal cup when there is something with which I’d like to fill it. 

I struggled to write for the past few weeks. It wasn’t writer’s block: I was brimming with ideas. It was rather a kind of frenetic paralysis that would come over me in between having an idea and wrangling it into something meaningful on the page. My attention would wander. I’d get distracted by errant blinks, dings, and pings, my own worries, or passing thoughts that led nowhere.

I’m going through a few big life transitions simultaneously, and frankly have been a little obsessed with my own thoughts. In phases like this, my attention turns inward. A hallmark of my anxiety is being preoccupied with myself, and my inner world, more than anyone or anything else. This is a real Catch 22, because a more myopic worldview creates a stagnant system, closed off from a fresh stream of new input and ideas. But also, because when I lose my ability to make lucid observations - to notice things precisely and appreciatively about the world around me - I lose touch with something I really love about myself. 

Even if full control over our attention is an illusion, we quite clearly have the ability to gently pull ourselves away from what isn’t serving us and towards what is. I’m slowly coming back to ‘health’ on that measure, and here are a few things that helped me get there. 

Training my attention 

Instead of meditatively trying to focus on less, or on developing comfort with absence, I’ve tried to be really intentional about focusing on more. Here’s what I mean: when I notice something that attracts me: birdsong, a shadow pattern on the ground, the rolling motion of the sea under a dock, I linger on it. I devote/give/offer it my full attention. By tuning my noticing powers, and adopting a reverent focus, I start to feel that the beauty of the world isn’t beyond me. It is me, and it’s important that I’m here to behold it. 

@mindvrchives

Perhaps this practice is more akin to mantra-based meditation, where having an object creates the opportunity to anchor the mind. I haven’t encountered this on Headspace or Calm – but if what I’m describing tracks to your own more practiced experience of meditation, I’d love to hear from you about that.

Worthwhile objects of our attention can be found everywhere, but not all environments are satisfying in the same ways. This was quite obvious to me this summer, when a few weeks at the shore of the Long Island Sound or a few days on Possession Beach in the Pacific Northwest were so rich with options for training my attention that the exercise felt almost effortless (versus at home in the city in Oakland, where I can hear the metallic whine of the BART from my window). I may be a city mouse, but with these realizations, the country calls me in a whole new way. Luckily, a slow walk through the hills in Berkeley is only a few minutes drive away, where I can find bees humming in the lavender and notice the shifts a drought has on the same plants I walk by weekly. Those places are worth seeking.

The power of sound 

I’ve been fascinated by sound for a long time. Less the mechanics, and more what sound can engender. The earliest Dipsea stories (the audio erotica company I co-founded in 2018) were essentially sonic vignettes. They were mildly sexy in their dialogue and exposition, but in retrospect, we were just as interested in placemaking as we were in erotic narrative. For a few minutes, a Dipsea story could take you to an eco-lodge in Tulum, or a house party where the mirrors in the bathrooms are steamed up from so many tightly packed bodies. By training your attention to the sounds around you, Dipsea stories could isolate you from distractions and potentially even the own incessant thought train of your mind. The original idea – perhaps more art than product – was to use sound to reduce noise, opening the door to feelings of sensuality and desire that are often drowned out.  We wanted to help you notice these feelings.

Over the past year, I’ve taken up the habit of recording soundscapes that I encounter in the world. I’ve recorded an early morning at the edge of Lake Como, the chorus of doves, crickets and frogs on a steamy day in New York, pebbles clattering at the beach in Mendocino, and the rush of the overflowing Yuba River after a heavy spring snow. I can use it to focus my attention, and appreciate how much it allows me to tune out the noise (real noise, and also mental noise). 

Here’s Lake Como on an early morning in June:

@ramone_wedd

If you’ve never tried this, I’d encourage you to create a recording of the next place that strikes you as particularly lovely. All it takes is a phone, an hour, and maybe a towel to keep it out of the sun. It’s amazing what you’ll start to notice: both in the act of recording (if you stay nearby, you’ll likely be very aware of what’s being captured), as well as when you listen back. Different birds are chirping in the morning versus the afternoon. The volume of the ocean is noticeably different as the tide goes out. The white-noise-mimicking din of a river when captured on a river rock softens dramatically if you record a few yards farther from the water. The interaction of “natural” and human sounds helps you to realize all the ways we’re also a part of the system.

The ordinary and even the ugly can be precious too

The first time I listened back to the first recording I took, I was struck that even in this aspirationally peaceful place, there was so much…clunk! In between the waves gently lapping, it caught the laughter and clanging of men at work early in the morning. The opening and closing of a garage door. The siren of a European ambulance rounding the bend. But the imperfection is the beauty. Ephemeral, impossible to recreate, and precious. Those sounds bring me right back to how I felt in that place, and what was present for me while I was there.

The most recent recording I took was in my parents’ yard. Unaware of what I was doing, my mom marched towards me through the tall grass and clover (swish, swish, swish) to ask me a question (is dad inside?). I shhhhhed her, and regretted it. I started over, and resolved to capture whatever it is that I would get for those next 30-60 minutes. I’ll hear the murmur of my mother’s voice, surely still a part of take two, and be so glad it was part of the tapestry.  

Noticing as a path to self-trust

A few days ago I took my morning coffee out onto the patio in Seattle, Washington. I closed my eyes in the sunshine, and felt an inexplicably familiar feeling wash over me. Something about the chilly bite in the air, combined with the contrasting heat and particular angle of the sun, brought me back to being a kid in the summer in Switzerland. Out of curiosity, I looked at the latitudes of Seattle and Zurich:  

• Seattle: 47.6061° North

• Zurich: 47.3769° North

I was able to make this connection purely based on sensation. It was a gentle reminder that our own noticing and knowing can be trustworthy.

It reminded me of another moment where noticing produced awareness: When I was a teenager in New York, every autumn I would notice that the airplanes flying overhead became a little louder. It was a conscious observation, but I’d never heard anyone else talk about it. So it stayed a benign secret, lingering somewhere in my mind between fact and superstition. Years later, when I finally mentioned to someone that I associated fall with the sound of airplanes overhead, they didn’t raise their eyebrows at me. Instead, they suggested that sounds might get louder in the fall in New York because the trees are bare. That seemed plausible: I hadn’t noticed the airplane phenomenon since I’d moved to California, where fall is basically summer.

@ramone_wedd

I’ve since learned that what I’d noticed is a real phenomenon. Because of a seasonal temperature inversion, faraway sounds bend back around towards the surface of the earth, making them louder and clearer. Smaller inversions also happen at nighttime, when distant highway noises become more noticeable, and conversations can be heard more clearly across bodies of water (like the lore around Alcatraz prisoners in their cells being able to hear music and laughter from late night parties across the bay). ​​

I found an article that said, “While humans might not have an intuitive understanding of this phenomenon, elephants take advantage of it, knowing they can hear each other’s calls over a much larger area during early evening.” Fascinating. But maybe humans do have an intuition for it. Maybe we have an intuition for much more than we realize.