Photo by Максим Степаненко on Unsplash
I’m reading the book, How to do Nothing - Resisting the Attention Economy, by Jenny Odell. Jenny is an artist and a professor. A general observer of life and a bird lover and watcher. While I am only three chapters in, it has given me pause to consider everything that pulls my attention.
One of the exercises in my class, A Journey Toward Embodied Freedom, involves just this - paying attention.
Hmm... is this a coincidence? Fate? The law of attraction?
Nine times a day, we are to pick an object and focus on it for 15-30 seconds and then slowly pull back, taking in the rest of what is around that object. I’ve noticed, in this noticing, that I feel like I am looking at ordinary objects for the first time in my life — the way light reflects off a pair of reading glasses, the messaging on a kombucha bottle, the details of a napkin, its folds and patterns, the way my cat situates himself when he wants to rest. I feel like I am looking at life through the lens of an artist, or maybe even a baby, discovering things for the very first time.
What all of this paying attention has done is make one thing very clear: attention is finite. I can’t give it to everything. So I’ve gotten more intentional about where it actually goes.
The birds at our feeder.
The coos of my grandson.
Lunch (or breakfast or dinner) with my husband.
My guidance practice.
My blogs.
A phone call with one of my adult children, a friend, or a sibling.
And even the mundane - the kombucha bottle, the napkin, my cat.
This book, my new class and practices, all of this paying attention has in turn made me consider what I don’t want to pay attention to:
The newsletters and blogs I swipe right.
Social media.
Regular (left or right leaning) media.
Outgrown relationships.
I don’t need to announce any of it. No big goodbyes. No explanations. Just a quiet unsubscribe and that can look different depending on the day. Sometimes it’s as small as swiping right past a newsletter I’ve outgrown. Sometimes it’s the bigger, harder thing, letting a long-term friendship fade away because we’ve simply grown in different directions. Both are valid. Both are a choice. And neither requires a press release. I have a choice. Engage or not. It really is that simple even when it isn’t.
And then there is room. Room for the in between place of not completely paying attention, not checked out entirely. The places where I engage because something in the discomfort makes me show up differently. A conscious choice. The places where I am doing my work, where my attention is needed even when I’d rather look away. Unsubscribing from those distractions gives me a greater capacity to show up for the things that actually matter:
Engaging in community.
Going to my networking group.
Allowing space for creativity (even if this includes “failures”).
Allowing space for business expansion (even if this includes “failures”).
Being uncomfortable.
Even more uncomfortable things.
Because it’s in that discomfort, that in-between of doing nothing and doing something, where attention becomes Presence. Conscious Presence. And when we lean into that, there’s room for the Divine to show up with whatever gives us that oomph toward growth. Making space by quietly unsubscribing from life’s distractions allows something else to show up.
And I think we could all use a little more something else.
