Learning to Pay Attention
Image by David Mark from Pixabay
This season I want to operationalize thinking for you. I want to give you the tools to think deeply and develop insight that leads to wise action.
Thinking is not a simple linear affair where you follow a rigidly defined sequence of steps, but neither does thinking border on being a will ‘o the wisp. Thinking is the product of cultivating a group of core dispositions that I call Learner’s Mind. These are in the reach of both young and old. In fact, preschoolers have a head start over adults!
The first disposition is attention. The brain ignores the vast majority of sensory inputs but learning presupposes basic awareness. Attention devotes brain resources to an intentional selection of particular inputs. Attention is about taking the lid off your brain to allow more inputs, not focusing more intently on the task at hand—although the latter is not a bad idea when you’re in efficiency mode trying to exploit what you already know or are seeking to know.
Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay
What follows is a rough transcript of the podcast with this title: Developing Learner’s Mind: Cultivating Attention (S4 E1). In addition to the text of the podcast I provide links within the script and explore some topics in more depth (at the end of the podcast script).
“This season I’m going to help you purposefully develop what I call Learner’s Mind.
In some ways Learner’s Mind starts with the mind you had as a young child when the world was full of wonders and possibilities. Every day held the potential for adventure. You might travel to your adventure, but just as likely your yard or your neighborhood had loads of possible adventures. When my 5 kids were young, the little creek that bisects our back yard was ripe with adventures. Not infrequently, they “fell” into it (by accident of course) as they pursued critters. They enacted heroic battles on the bridge. They used it as a water hazard for their games. You get the idea. I suspect some version of that was you as well in your youthful past.
To start to develop Learner’s Mind let’s focus on the simple basic of Attention. Attention is the first manifestation of Curiosity. Curiosity is the fundamental starting point for all learning. It is the foundational C of the 7 C’s of Cognition that I explained in last season’s podcasts. If you haven’t heard of the 7C’s, it would be helpful to assimilate that overview of learning. It will be the foundation for developing Learner’s Mind as we walk together through this season.
Let’s take a deeper dive into Curiosity. To be curious is to be humble. It is to admit that I don’t know everything or more basically, that I don’t know much compared with all there is to know. Adults very often brush off opportunities to learn because they assume they already know, or they view the potential gain in knowledge as minimal and not worth the interruption. Adults tend to be characterized by two related E’s: efficiency and exploitation. Let’s talk about efficiency and leave exploitation for the next podcast.
Efficiency usually emphasizes time management. Commendable as the efficiency orientation may sometimes be, it eliminates the possibility of worlds that are yet unexplored. Horatio in Shakespeare’s Hamlet invites an openness to the possibilities of the mind-altering and life-altering that lie just beyond our accumulated experience. Hamlet says, “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” We need to welcome strangers, especially ideas that we’ve never met. We need to recognize that a lifetime only allows encounters with a small subset of what there is to know. Learner’s Mind enables us to maximize learning and that’s the best kind of efficiency.
Young children soak up the world around them. Small kids are into Exploration and the very idea reeks of inefficiency. How long are we going to explore? Where are we going to explore? What are we looking for? These are adult questions based on the efficiency paradigm.
I’m not suggesting you abandon your quest for efficiency and jump headfirst into unlimited exploration. It’s not an either/or. Efficiency alone is horribly limiting. Exploration alone is terribly inefficient. I’m not countenancing being easily distracted. We’ve already got too distraction in our lives and the illusion of multitasking keeps us from thinking deeply about anything. Toggling purposefully between the openness and the disciplined focus is the right strategy.
We’ve all heard the admonition to “stop and smell the roses.” Perhaps it seems a bit naïve. Perhaps even a tad self-indulgent when there’s so much that needs to be done. Step one is to be paying enough attention that you recognize there are roses. You can choose where to direct your attention. The default for most of us, myself included, is for inertia to keep us moving past the roses. We are fully caught up with what has already grabbed us today (which is typically leftover from yesterday). This has rightly been called the tyranny of the urgent.
My wife and I were recently on a vacation in Scotland. While we were in a small coastal village she called out “look at those roses!” There they were—dozens of coral-colored roses thriving outside a small public library. I had walked right by them on my quest to cover territory.
We periodically recognize that we need to escape the tyranny of the urgent and we resolve to do so by taking a vacation. The most common vacation destinations are the beach and the mountains. Both involve an opportunity to be quieted by something much larger than us. The immensity of the ocean or the majesty of the mountains can help to put our concerns into perspective. Montana is “Big Sky Country.” The opportunity to explore the inky night sky in Montana without the light pollution of cities is extraordinary.
Unfortunately, it’s not unusual to return from a vacation needing a vacation. How does that happen? Because we missed our opportunity to be quieted due to all the activities we tried to pack into the week or two of vacation. We intended to be still, but we reverted to our default setting of efficiency. We may have achieved our goal of going places and doing things, but we missed our opportunity for contemplative solitude and really paying attention because doing so wasn’t efficient.
This happens in relationships as well. Too often we aren’t really listening to our spouse or our children. We hear their words, but we don’t really pay attention to them. At times the other person may call us out with something like “are you listening to me?” Hearing the words and giving them our attention are often very different things. Paying attention is necessary for healthy relationships. We all need to be heard. We need to be seen. We need to be responded to.
There is a parallel with the physical world. From the standpoint of size humans are roughly in the middle of a continuum that stretches out to the limits of our knowledge of space (recently enlarged by the James Webb space telescope) and in the other direction to the microscopic and nanoscopic worlds that ultimately extend beyond atoms to elementary particles.
To seriously contemplate space is to face its immensity and our seeming insignificance. I say seeming insignificance. The Psalmist provides the perspective adjustment in
When I consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers,
The moon and the stars, which You have set in place;
What is man that You think of him,
And a son of man that You are concerned about him?
The immensity of the universe doesn’t render humans insignificant. They aren’t inconsequential for the very reason that God thinks about them because they are the focus of God’s concern. Simply put we have God’s attention! It follows that we should reciprocate. We should pay attention. We should consider the handiwork of God, the Psalmist says. Considering is the entry point. It is paying attention.
God is a communicating being. He communicates most basically through the physical universe. The astounding order and pattern of the universe are unavoidable. Everywhere on every level “the heavens are telling the glory of God.”
Day to day pours forth speech,
And night to night reveals knowledge.
There is no speech, nor are there words;
Their voice is not heard.
Their [sound] has gone out into all the earth,
And their words to the end of the world.
God communicates through the ingenious physicality of every component of the universe. He communicates without using words. That makes this communication universal and not tied to human languages.
God communicates universally and with powerful clarity through the things that He has made. Are we paying attention? Attention is the gift we give to nurture relationships, and, in the process, we find that we grow. Don’t settle for mere efficiency in managing the small slice that you already know, cultivate a willingness to go against the flow and Pay Attention!
Next Podcast:
Attention is the first component of curiosity. Perception (seeing) is the second. Perception is only possibly if we first give our attention to reality. I’ll develop perception in the next podcast.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning memorably captured the crucial relationship of attention and perception in these well-known lines:
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries,
Join me in two weeks to take the next step in developing the dispositions that make up Learner’s Mind.
If you’d like to enrich your study of attention or follow-up on my sources for today, please go to my blog post at Deep and Durable.com”
Attention is developed in the videos below. [This is not wholesale endorsement. It is an opportunity to explore.]
Some would conflate attention with mindfulness. I prefer to stay away from the term mindfulness because of its imprecision. It is typically coupled with meditation and involves an emptying of the mind. Attention as I use it involves a purposeful focusing of the mind.