Our whole life is rush rush rush.

We have become so accustomed to rushing that if we are not rushing to get somewhere or to do something, or to finish something that if we are not rushing, we feel we are not doing anything.

This is what I used to feel anyway.

Writing, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. To be a good writer, you need to slow down. You need to become more observant. You need to take in sensory clues and synthesize them. You need to allow your mind to make connections. To draw insights.

This week I was going through some old notes of mine when I came across one of the exercises in Rob Walker’s Art of Noticing newsletter back in 2020.

Take a familiar walk and identify five boring things that are of no interest whatsoever.

I decided to try that. Since it has been raining here, I decided to try this exercise while driving to the gym in the morning.

Invariably I am late for the gym. So while driving, my whole focus is to get past other cars and get through the light while it is still green (still within speed limits) to that I can make it to the class in time.

Needless to say, I start my day with unnecessary stress.

But on Tuesday, as I was noticing the boring things that were of no interest whatsoever, the things I would ignore otherwise, I relaxed a bit.

This is what I noticed:

• Steam coming from the Canberra hospital building’s air-conditioning.
• The hint of green on every branch of the willow tree by the creek.
• An abandoned shopping trolly.
• A wheely electronic sign-board that was switched off
• The empty skating slopes of at the corner of the park

Then I forgot all about these things during the day.

The next morning when I was writing the morning pages, these things came back to me, and I wrote them down. While doing that, I started pondering why I noticed these things and not the other things.

Was my mind biased to pick these things?

Why did the steam coming from the Canberra hospital building’s air-conditioning stand out more than anything else?

Memories came rushing in. For the past eight years, Canberra Hospital has played a prominent role in our lives. I visited it frequently when both my parents and my mother-in-law were in and out of the facility with various aliments. I have spent many nights there. Sometimes I will go there in the middle of winter nights, and as soon as I would see the steam coming from the chimney on the tenth floor of the building, a sense of relief will fall on me. The air conditioning is working. It is warm in there. My parents are warm and comfortable. They are being looked after.

The boring thing wasn’t boring at all. There was a deeper meaning associated with it.

The hint of green on the willow tree by the creek announced that spring was just two weeks away.

The abandoned trolly reminded me of the homeless person I had seen in the city years ago, whose entire belonging were in a shopping trolly. How do the homeless survive the Canberra winter out in the open? Did this trolly belong to some homeless person too?

The wheel electronic signboard played a prominent role in our lives during the drought years in Canberra not so long ago. Each day while driving back, the commuters would read the water level in the dam and how much water Canberrians used that day. People stopped wasting water. They were careful while watering their gardens and conserved water as much as they could. The consumption reduced to half and then kept going down. The local government said that wheely electronic signboards they had installed at various arterial routes played a big part. Today that signboard wasn’t silent. There was no need. We have had plenty of rain this year.

This was an exercise in paying attention. It helped me to slow down and find the meaning of trivial things.

Attention is not a resource, but a way of being alive to the world.

Dan Nixon wrote an essay in which he talked about how attention is misunderstood and misused in the ‘attention economy.’

The ‘attention economy,’ portrays our attention as a limited resource at the center of the informational ecosystem, where various information outlets are competing to grab our attention.

But our attention is much more than that.

Attention is what joins us with the outside world. ‘Instrumentally’ attending is important, sure. But we also have the capacity to attend in a more ‘exploratory’ way: to be truly open to whatever we find before us, without any particular agenda.

Dan Nixon talks about a trip to Japan where he found himself with few free hours in Tokyo. Stepping out into the busy district of Shibuya, he wandered aimlessly amid the neon signs and crowds of people.

My senses met the wall of smoke and the cacophony of sound as I passed through a busy pachinko parlour. For the entire morning, my attention was in ‘exploratory’ mode. That stood in contrast to, say, when I had to focus on navigating the metro system later that day.

By treating attention as a resource, and engaging both hemispheres of the brain (left logical and right creative)we can ‘deliver’ the world to us in two different ways.

The left hemisphere of the brain analyzes and categorizes things so that it can use them towards some end.

By contrast, the brain’s right hemisphere adopts an exploratory mode of attending: a more embodied awareness, one that is open to whatever presents itself to us in all its fullness.

This mode of ‘exploratory attention’ comes into play, for instance, when we pay attention to other people, to the natural world, and to works of art.

It is also the exploratory mode of attention that can connect us to our deepest sense of purpose.

This is what American philosopher William James had in mind in 1890 when he wrote:

What we attend to is reality. — William James

The simple but profound idea is that what we pay attention to, and how we pay attention, shapes our reality, moment to moment, day to day, and so on.

What are you paying attention to?