Most people think attention is something you pay for. Consider the saying ‘pay attention’ – almost as if it were a coin you drop into a vending machine. But that’s not how attention works.
Attention is what you are, right now. The observer observing the observed.
Everything you’ve ever experienced in your life arrived through attention. Even when you thought you were half asleep.
If you are conscious – and there are degrees of that – you are paying attention.
In the early days of foraging, although I thought I was using my body and my mind, my attention was three hundred yards behind.
I’d be drafting an email reply in my head, working out a bill I had to pay, or chewing over things that happened years ago, along with all the other rubbish that trundles through our brains.
It’s genuinely hard to be attentive, to pay attention in the moment. That’s why it’s easy to say, ‘Just meditate. Pay attention to your breath. Follow it in and out.’ Try it for half an hour without losing focus. It’s extraordinarily difficult.
And yet, to develop kinship – to restore kinship with the non-human world, and with our own species – we need to be attentive.
You can’t be in two places at once. Your body can’t be standing next to a hawthorn tree in flower while your attention is festering over some resentment, some slight from the week before. You’re either with the tree or you’re not.
Scholars have a word for this: phenomenology.
The experts need to put fancy words on it, give it some convoluted lingo. In reality, we’re simply not awake. We are sleepwalkers for most of our life. That’s it. It’s that simple.
Where attention goes, experience follows.
The quality of your life is the quality of your attention. If all you attend to is a scrolling social media feed, your life is not going to be very full.
If all you do is log onto X, formerly Twitter, and indulge in hate rants against whoever – whether you’re on the left or the right – your life will be full of nothing but fury and frustration.
Now, some people live on that. It’s dopamine. It’s a drug. And that’s what many people crave.
With Domei, we do it differently. We unplug from all that. We don’t fixate on the social media feed. We don’t fixate on the hate conversations doing the rounds. We don’t fixate on the news headlines.
Instead, we bring our attention back to here and now – to where we are, our place in the world.
So when I’m with the hawthorn tree, I am with it. I am attending to it, paying attention.
The payment, if you sit with that phrase, ‘paying attention’, is that we’re paying to have a life, rather than being lost in our reactions to the world. To what was as well as what is to come.
By paying conscious attention, we respond rather than react; we are in control. The vast machine no longer plays us, nor do the political warmongers and hate-mongers.
Simple practices of paying attention in place allow us to reclaim our soul.
We’re no longer handing our attention over to some twenty-six-year-old in California tweaking an algorithm, purely to keep us hooked.
Addicted to the pings and notifications, the grinding, relentless noise of a culture that profits from our distraction.
The plants are still here. The non-human world is still waiting.
To restore genuine kinship with it, we are going to need our attention back. All of it.
For the deeply curious.