‘Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.’ - Ralph Waldo Emerson

We, the people of the 21st century, who have sheltered, cherished and fed the parasites of attention all this while, now look solemnly towards its demise with hurriedly written elegies, noting how life must still go on however dim its quality. We wave hopeful flags as we prepare its grave, scribbled with words like ‘multitasking’, ‘efficiency’, ‘adaptation to the new world order’ and the like for consolation. But, how inconsolable the ordeal, how fidgety our responses. Among the hush that clouds over us, you say with an uneasy voice: "but we still have some attention left, however scattered it might be, right?". And I smile in response, grieving along with you through the first phase of denial.

There is something perversely satisfying about sounding dirges before the doom, about letting the mourners through before mourning begins. But, let us not give into that temptation, and still hold true to the living, although scarcely breathing concept of attention. Why do we need it? What makes it so integral to the human cause? Why is it under threat and what can we do about it?

John Green answers the fundamental question - What to do with one’s life when all one feels is lost? - by quoting his friend, “Pay attention to what you pay attention to”. This might sound profound to some, and a mere exercise in rhetoric to others, but either way the crucial point holds true: Whatever grabs your attention repeatedly paints the path for you to pursue. It might turn out to be a dead-end, but it’s worth taking a shot at. We are talking about an entire life here, a life that could potentially be injected with meaning if we manage to figure out our path.

Paying attention discloses aspects of the world which were always a blur before. If you see an object for a time greater than what it demands, it would start showing itself to you in a new light, or for that matter, in its latent darkness. The reality we inhabit is not simply an objective world mediated through our senses as it is; it is rather a co-creation which demands an active participation from us. Attention makes the world we inhabit: whether it turns out hospitable or hostile.

This idea of remaking the world by paying attention can be an effective shelter against the wintry seasons of our soul. Barbara Kingsolver writes in her essay ‘High Tide in Tucson’, “In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of a full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again.” As we gaze into the world for long, the world wakes up to return our gaze.

Simone Weil talks about the idea of attention as a moral obligation. “Learn to be attentive in order to be just”, she proclaims emphatically and then goes on to lead a just and attentive life. Talk about ‘walking the talk’! Weil’s idea of attention is a bit different from what we have been discussing here. She talks about attention as vigilance, an essential openness to the world and its people. It is a kind of keen awareness, facilitating what Virginia Woolf calls ‘moments of being’. It also has connotations of waiting attached to it. She says, “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.” The idea is to train the senses and the mind, to tune them to a frequency in concert with the world, to keep our doors ajar for the moment when the world decides to walk in, and to prepare ourselves to attend to people who need our attention and care. It is essentially selfless, because attending to others silences the false fantasies of our self. At least for a time, it does. Iris Murdoch echoes the sentiment, “We cease to be, in order to attend to the existence of something else: a natural object, a person in need.”

We live in a world where distraction is the norm, a world where we are ‘distracted from distraction by distraction’. How can one engage in any meaningful pursuit, which by its very nature demands attention of the highest order, when all the meaning is drained out through the sieve of distraction. What’s left is just a big boring blur. There’s nothing steady and anchored to boast of. The life of the inattentive person is a life of radical ruptures, because he has allowed the nerves of his inner life to go numb, and the only things that get registered with him are obscenely loud, bright and catchy. It is the age of the ‘click-bait’. The knack to perceive subtlety is thrown out the window, and thus most of what life has to offer falls on blind eyes and deaf ears. The social world is also left stumbling under the dying light of attention. If ‘attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity’, then we moderns are the most stingy of the whole human lot. To attend to another human being with one’s whole presence is a venture we rarely even try to take on. And whenever we do, we fail miserably.

To cultivate one’s attention is to cultivate one’s life. The ideal is to achieve the right dynamic between attention as focus and attention as vigilance. Christian Wiman is reaching for something similar in his book ‘My Bright Abyss’ when he writes, “There is a kind of seeing that, fusing attention and submission, becomes a kind of being, wherein you may burrow into the very chaos that buries you, and even the most binding ties can become a means of release.” There are not many things in our age that are conducive to realizing this ideal; in fact most of them are hostile to it. Yet, to preserve the ideal and persevere for it is to light up the world again.

Now, the question is, how does one go about preserving the ideal of attention, not just as a grand theoretical idea but one with the modesty of mud and bricks. For structural solutions, you can turn to Johann Hari for guidance. In his book, 'Stolen Focus', he argues that the social media companies whose whole revenue model is based on hacking your attention and keeping your eyeballs glued to the screen for as long as possible, are one of the primary culprits of this dimming twilight of attention. If we are to preserve and recover our attention, their incentives have to change from hacking your attention to maybe caring and providing for what you really want (assuming you want to avoid doom-scrolling yourself to death). Subscription model of revenue generation is one option. You pay for the services of these companies, so that they don’t have to sell your attention to advertisers and make money from it. Other alternative models are also being thought out all over the world.

Johann Hari also argues for better working conditions, four day work-weeks and a better premium on holidays and leaves. These would take the employees out of their never-ending cycle of work, that is generally full of stress and lack of sleep, and give them time to recover. Overwhelming conditions at work can be detrimental to attention, and thus need to be fought against. You should always be alert on the ways in which your working conditions are taking a toll on your body, and be assertive enough to claim better working conditions for yourself.

Structural solutions take time, and as individuals, we might even feel helpless if our voices go unheard. This might lead you to reach for your phone and drown out this growing helplessness in the mire of memes and TikTok videos. That certainly doesn’t help. If you are looking for individual solutions, start with your phone. Shut down all notifications on your phone, and identify a time when you check up on all the things that you might have missed during the day. Your phone should not talk back to you, especially when you are trying to fix your attention. Only work notifications must be allowed to chime in.

Try to set up a routine task which demands all your attention, and could not be done without it. Say, when you wake up in the morning, after a cup of tea, you may pick up a book of poems and read them slowly, one at a time, meditating on every single one of them. Reading good poems requires attention of the highest order and could be a great way to re-gather your broken pieces of attention. Cal Newport suggests following the practice of the Jesuits, where they start their day by focusing on a piece of biblical literature and try to memorize it with comprehension. All these practices are ways to heal your attention, that has been fatally wounded at the crossroads of modernity.

Lastly, do the basics right. Engage with the world. Your life will fly by you in a flash, and you will be left wanting. Attend to people around you while you can. Stop lying around on the bed of your numbness and feel the world strike you with its primeval force. Pay attention!

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