The Adventure of Attention

by Grant Faulkner

This week, I’ve been in a land far, far away from my home. It’s a land where food is plentiful, where people cruise by me in the latest mobility aids (aka walkers), and where there seems to always be a game of balloon volleyball or Bingo. Best of all, everyone naps a lot!

Paradise? No, I’ve been staying with my mother in her care center, as I will this week as well, and it really is a very different place for me. For one, I talk, walk, and think about 100 miles per hour faster than those around me—which isn’t necessarily a good thing—so I’ve had to face the nearly impossible task of slowing down and being patient.

The thing is I enjoy the speed of my life so much. I’m so good at brusque forward motion. You don’t know how tough this is for me.

As a way to slow down, I decided that I should write a personal essay about my two weeks in the care center—a travel essay of a type. What I love about this idea is that it has turned the day-to-day banalities of living here into a type of exotic exploration.

In fact, I’ve been pausing to notice all that is going on around me. Instead of nervously pulling out my phone at breakfast today, I talked with the other residents and learned about their lives, immersed myself in a round of “Happy Birthday to You” as a nurse belted it out using a bottle of water as her mic, and wrote a vignette about another nurse who I see making the rounds with people’s medications every day.

It was a reminder about how paying attention is necessary for meaning and creation—and how noticing can lead to contentment and peace.

What do you pay attention to?

“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” wrote the poet Mary Oliver.

By writing this “travel piece” about my stay in the care center, it’s made me think about how we get so caught up in our lives that we sometimes miss the richness of the life around us.

Pause and ask yourself what you are devoted to. Are you devoted to the bustle of your to-do list? Are you devoted to the twisting crimps of the day’s most petty emotions? Or are you devoted to things more whimsical, more peculiar, more sensuous, more subversive, more lustrous, more delectable, more divine—that’s right, the wonderful swirl of life around you!

We tend to give our attention away too easily. A screen calls us like a siren, and we’re helplessly in thrall to its songs. The act of attention is an act of assertion, though: you’re claiming your life instead of being claimed by it.

If we pay attention to our attention, we’ll find an instruction manual on how to focus our gaze. Things that generally go unnoticed suddenly blossom with unexpected life. The twig, soon to fall off of a tree, trembling in the wind. The crumb on a plate that becomes a snowflake on our tongues.

One definition of a story: it’s a series of moments of attention.

So hone the craft of being alert to life. Notice gravity. Notice oil stains on pavement. Notice arabesques in dust. Notice the quiet glories hidden in people. Notice the pace of your breaths. There’s always a revelation to be found, a nuance to be traced. The tatters of fog swaying in the wind. A tree’s strange calligraphy against the sky. Drizzle whispering on the windows.

“One tree is like another, but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether,” wrote Mary Oliver.

We are what we think about. We are what we put our energy towards.

How to define “adventure”

In my early days as a writer, I think my attention was more powerful, more focused, more delightful, more nourishing because I was so entirely driven by shaping myself into a writer. I searched out firsts. I took all sorts of risks (many I shouldn’t have). I only wanted an adventurous life.

I thought of adventure in terms of peak experiences back then, but adventure can take many forms. The best kind of adventure isn’t necessarily about climbing the mountain, but noticing the mountain. You can climb a mountain without noticing it, after all, and you can notice a mountain without climbing it.

Adventure might be best defined as simply being alert to life.

By paying attention to my life in the care center, it’s turned into a type of adventure because noticing is making life come alive.

We make life come alive by paying attention to it.