Paying Attention

Winifred Gallagher, author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, argues that the quality of human life is not dictated by the things that happen to us, by our reactions to those things, by our heredity or environment, by our gender or race, but rather the quality of human life is dictated by what each of us chooses to pay attention to.

If I choose to focus on the negative things I encounter each day, then my life will be fraught with fretting, full of fear, and completely chaotic.  However, if I focus on the small things that I find beautiful, if I allow myself to slip past the negativity and instead drift into the trancelike state of rapt attention, I may find myself not only calmer, more energetic, and less stressed, but fundamentally happier, too.

An old friend wrote a blog entry today about special needs kids and her dear sister, Sara, with whom I attended high school.  As I read Katie's blog, it occurred to me that by nature of her differentness, Sara focuses on the positive in her world far more often than the negative.  In fact, I've seen her irritated, but in the 20+ years I have known their family, I can't say that I've ever seen Sara unhappy.  Is that because sad things have never happened to her?  No.  But it may be because her diagnosis allows her to see the negative things in her life as less valuable than the positive things.  And that's not a detriment, that's a gift.

I work with students all the time who have trouble taking social cues, who don't know how to navigate a sarcasm laden conversation, who couldn't be insincere if they were payed to be, and rather than feeling sorry for them or wishing their situation would somehow 'improve,' I often find myself wishing the rest of my students had the same issues.  The same blinders that seem to negate the trend toward teen angst and cynicism.  Wouldn't it be lovely if all students--all people for that matter--woke up tomorrow and decided to pay attention to positivity?

All of this stems from a young man in one of my classes today who said, "Everyone is fake and everyone lies."  I was heartbroken to hear this from a bright, capable young man whom I so enjoy having in class because this kind of negative view tends to belie an inherent distrust of the world at large and, in my experience, that distrust most often leads to unhappy relationships and sadness.  I tried to tell him I do not lie, I don't believe in it, but he said if I have ever lied then I am, in fact, a liar.  This need to see the world in extremes, labels, one incident dictating a person's fate forever is--to be sure--an adolescent notion, but it strikes me that the country is becoming more and more narrow, more and more black and white, as opposed to becoming more accepting, more open.

Today an anti-abortion bill was passed in South Dakota and anti-labor legislation passed the senate in Ohio, and the Supreme Court sided with the right to hate speech of the Westboro Baptist Church.  Think about that: three momentous decisions all on the side of negativity.  We are focused on the terrible things happening overseas, the monstrosities being perpetrated here at home, the tragic downfall of an educational system hell bent on reaching kids who just don't care.  Is it any wonder depression diagnoses are up and public happiness is down?

My wish today is that, as the sun begins to spend a little more time in the sky on this side of the world each day, and as we move into--finally--warmer weather, that perhaps we will all take a few minutes to pay attention to the things that fill us with joy.  Total wonder.  Our rapt faces brilliant in the bright light of what we used to call hope for a better tomorrow.