Attention! Attention! I am sure we have all heard this kind of call, perhaps over a public address system. It demands that we listen.
The word ‘attention’ can have this sense of a demand or command. As children at school we were required to stand in lines, with our feet together and hands by our sides. This was called standing to attention. The command, ‘Attention!’ derived from a military setting and was used to create order in the school. The idea was that standing in this way meant we were now to listen for further instructions or notices, and in military settings it precedes further orders.
I wish this was not my first sense of the word attention. This idea of demand or command fails to recognise what I now want to name as the primary value of life, the first thing we need if we are to live well. In a series of posts, I want to identify what I have come to regard as quite fundamental values, indeed imperatives, for a healthy and creative life. I know it’s a bit late in the day for me, but better late than never.
I am thinking much about the conclusion of our lives and about the birth of new lives. This is my reality, within the family. What do we hope to leave for those who come after us, as core values and practices? I would like to call them virtues, but again that is a word with seriously unhelpful overtones and misunderstandings.
So I will just call them habits. That’s in fact a word with the sense of something to live in: the idea of a garment called a habit is the idea of our everyday clothing. We live in and into our habits and they shape who we are and how we are. Here, then, is my first and most fundamental habit—attention.
Actually, I do think this is very close to our first habit. With my grandchildren I have noticed how soon a baby pays attention: that is, they look at things. Parents look for that first time this tiny one looks at them and smiles. As we walk a baby in the pram, we see that they too are seeing, the movement of leaves on the trees, a bird, or that big, wide sky above them.
So much is focussed on a child learning to talk, but very little on learning to listen. But the reality is that they learn to talk through listening. Hearing is a quite basic element in attention.
A wonderful writer of the last century, both scholar and ascetic, Simone Weil, said some exceptional things about attention. She lived primarily in France, though travelled also to other places, and her short life ended with acute illness in Britain. Born in 1909, she died in 1943. She is described as a philosopher, mystic, and political activist. After teaching philosophy for some time, she developed strongly Marxist ideals and insisted she needed to live and work with the proletariat and close to the land. She became a factory worker and later a rural labourer, but was also ill much of the time. All the while, she reflected upon and wrote about her own search for God. Her most famous book is Waiting upon God, which narrates much of her journey and insights. Published in 1951, the title in French of this collection of her letters and essays is Attente de Dieu, evoking the sense of both waiting and paying attention.
Simone Weil wrote that attention is the very essence of love. It is at the heart of generosity. She explains that attention involves a kind of waiting: ‘Above all our thoughts should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it.’ (page 72).
She goes on to explain that many wrong translations or faulty connections come from us having already decided what we will find: we are ‘too active’ in wanting to carry out a search, when we would do better to ‘wait upon’ what she calls the precious gifts of truth. Thus she suggests that ‘our first duty towards school children and students is to make known this method to them’—attention (73). It is also the case with those who would be spiritual guides: to invoke the patient waiting upon reality, not demanding it, operating upon it, grasping, manipulating, and so forth.
Here I am reminded of the wonderful insights of her contemporary, German philosopher-theologian Josef Pieper (1904 – 1997), whose work Leisure distinguished the activities of ratio and intellectus. In the mode of ratio, the mind is active, as we might say ‘working out’, constructing and making meanings, conclusions, and so forth. But in intellectus, we allow ourselves to experience and be grasped by and to go with ideas or meanings, such as music and beauty of all forms, relationships and emotions, hopes and dreams. Both dimensions of knowledge are essential, but all too easily ratio is made ruler and controller, and our lives are both enriched and impoverished when this happens.
We need to learn to pay attention. The idea of paying attention implies that it may be an effort. I would prefer to say we need to give our attention, but it is a kind of devotion, which does require a kind of effort.
Attention is the highest form of generosity, according to Weil, and this attention is creative. It calls into being what does not yet exist, whether it is something of beauty or providing comfort or care to one in need.
Weil says that those who are unhappy ‘have no need in this world but people capable of giving them their attention’ —and that, she says, is almost a miracle. It is a simple (not meaning easy, but rather uncomplicated) way of looking at someone, to ask, ‘What are you going through?’ It is enough to learn to look at another, in this way: ‘This way of looking is first of all attentive. The soul empties itself of all its own content in order to receive into itself the being it is looking at, just as he (sic) is, in all his truth’ (75).
This creative, healing attention is also, Weil explains, the dynamic of God’s creativity, from the beginning and in every way continually. God as it were ‘holds back’, inviting all that is into being, through attending in love to what is yet to come into fullness and life.
Attention is the very foundation of living. We have it naturally and yet are always needing to re-learn it, to attend to it.
- It means looking, with eyes open to what we might see, not presuming.
- It means listening, without already thinking of what we might say in response.
- It means not being so busy or pre-occupied that we do not even notice.
- It means a radical freedom, more a freedom-for than a freedom-from.
- It means an openness to life.
Attention is a gift we can develop or learn, and it is the gift we can give to others, and to ourselves. I have found it so helpful to learn to see the rhythms of life, around me and within my own story.
Attention enables life. We live in it and it gives us life. With in this habit, we discover more and more of what is given.