up:: Spirituality MOC tags::#effort#output/substack#on/spirituality rank:: 2
Outputs: - output::#output/substack 2022-11-15 - How I’m trying to see everything with fresh eyes again - ^88b485 - output::#output/substack 2022-11-15 - Simone Weil and Attention in Everyday Life - ^b7b1cf - output::#output/substack 2022-11-26 - Where in Your Brain Does Attention come from? - Attention- a bit of right brain thinking - output::#output/substack 2023-01-26 - How Religion Led My Attention Astray
I just want to fix my attention- so I read Simone Weil for some ideas
To see everything with fresh eyes
It’s 2011 and I’m walking around Osaka for the first time.
Checking Google Maps or Tripadvisor isn’t the default. AirBnb isn’t a thing yet.
Besides, I don’t have data on my phone. So I just hop on the subway, pop out like a gopher and just start walking. I look left and right. I see the neon signs. I smell the fried octopus balls. I can hear people excitedly talking around me. I have some vague sense of where I am, but it doesn’t matter. I am 100% fully present.
There’s something about exploring, wandering, and even getting lost that is freeing. If I know I’m generally safe, my brain is finally allowed to relax and take in all the new stimuli around me. Everything is so fresh and new.
It’s a feeling I love.
Being open and seeing with fresh eyes. It happens when I travel, but I can experience it in other ways. When I’m learning a new skill or reading a nice book. I experience it when I’m exploring new ideas.
It’s a feeling of being alive and present in the moment. And it’s something I crave when I start to feel like my life is getting too routine.
Whenever I feel stuck, or like I’m just going through the motions, I try to find ways to get lost. I go for a drive. I will try to visit a new place. It gives my brain that jump start to feel awake and aware.
10 years later, I feel that way less and less.
Where has all the attention gone?
It would be so easy to rant against social media and the internet here.
At the risk of being the elder millennial waving from his porch at the world, it’s just so damn convenient to stay inside, watch some YouTube, work from home, and stay in this little pod I made for myself. Going outside takes way more work than (I feel like) it used to.
These are the questions that are burning in my mind now:
- How did it get so easy to zone out?
- Why did we let it get this way?
- Are there any ideas on ‘attention’ that I resonate with? (Be it neuroscience, philosophy, theology, psychology)
What can I do to get my attention back?
Simone Weil on the Importance of Attention in Everyday Life
I first encountered Simone Weil in graduate school, and she’s been on and off my beside books for so many years. I cannot claim to really understand her thinking. The words are so mysterious and impenetrable- it feels like the ramblings of a wild, free mind.
But every once in a while, one of her ideas will strike a chord. I will happen to be at just the right place and time in my life where her words resonate fully.
Today that is Weil’s ideas on attention.
In her own words:
For Weil, attention is a “negative effort,” one that requires that we stand still rather than lean in.
I find this definition painful and exciting. The paradox in talking about effort in standing still is so amazing to me. I think of meditation, and mindfulness and how fucking hard it is to just stand still.
In a way, it is easier to lean in- to move- to take action- to be hasty and to make things happen.
The effort required in just being still is infuriating.
Attention is not about focusing on finding answers for Weil. It’s not about getting to the end.
It is more about seeing questions and puzzles, and learning to sit with them even if we cannot find the answers. (Like koans in the Zen tradition)
In a subject like Mathematics, we can sit for a long time with a geometry problem, and at the end of an hour have made little progress.
But in that hour, we will have entered into “another more mysterious dimension” (Weil’s words).
This is a moral dimension: It is a space where, by our act of attention, we grasp what has always been the real mystery- the lives of our fellow human beings.
–
When I was in university, I was a Math student
I tell people I got into math for the simple clarity that it comes with. There are proofs and there are numbers.
But as I advanced in my subjects, the problems got more complex- I was be stumped with problems and questions I couldn’t answer
I remember this one night where I would lie awake, unable to sleep- thinking about a math problem. I would get up at 1 in the morning. Make some tea and then sit at my desk and continue to explore the possibilities of the problem. That was my favorite moment as a math student. The thrill of a puzzle that was beyond my current grasp.
Math is not a step by step linear approach. It’s actually a lot of trial and error. Sitting with problems that seem to make no sense.
Much like Weil’s attention
–
As I understand it then, attention is not about directing our will and energies into focusing on an issue or a problem. It is like a mystery, it is like getting lost- it’s like wandering around a new city and exploring something new.
Attention is a preparation. It’s being ready to attend to something that may come across my reality today. It is when I see everything and everyone with a beginner’s mind
When someone comes to my front door, and I send them away because I am busy with things that are imagined. I fail to attend to the reality in front of me
Attend to the demands of reality, and not a fantasy you imagine
Attention- a bit of right brain thinking
All this talk about ‘attention’ reminds me of a time I wanted to learn how to draw.
I am a mediocre artist at best.
But I always did envy my friends who could sketch and draw. There is something magical about being able to create something out of thin air, with nothing but a pencil and a scrap piece of paper. My artist friends recommended to the book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards.
There is a famous exercise in the book that involves upside down drawing.
Picassos-Upside-Down-Man-Drawing-1024x536.webp
You can do this yourself to see:
Take a piece of paper and try to draw the left image.
If you’re a beginner, and you try to draw the image on the left, it will be struggle. Your hand won’t cooperate with what you’re trying to do.
But simply flip the image around and try again. Draw the image on the right.
It will take you longer to do, but when you complete it, you’ll be surprised at how good your drawing actually looks!
Why does drawing upside down work?
The short answer is it works because you are not solving, but you are just observing.
When the image is upright, your brain says, “That’s a person in a chair! Okay. Let’s draw a person in a chair.”
But flip it around, and suddenly your brain goes, “That’s a weird squiggly line, and I’m just drawing a squiggly line.” 1
You’re not solving, you’re just observing.
This was a revelation to me.
I wrote in Part 1 how I love to travel. Because the newness and unfamiliarity of visiting a place makes me more present and more observant. The familiarity of home makes my brain go “I already know what that is!” Travel opens me up.
This one exercise in “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” was a revelation to me.
It was the first time I experienced that open-mindedness, curiosity, and “slow brain” without having to leave the four walls of my house. I wasn’t traveling, I was just at home. But I still felt like I was wandering and exploring.
I never did finish the book.
Or learn to draw.
But that book changed the way I think about thinking. And today I’ll build that to think about attention.
Attention exists in our “right brain”
There are a few ways that you can use to think about it:
Some language uses the idea of being left-brained and right-brained (which is what the drawing book used).
It’s a bit old-fashioned, but is still used sometimes to distinguish between a more rational problem-solving approach (associated with left brain). Versus a more creative, open, and exploring approach (right brain) 2
I don’t know if this is exactly what Simone Weil meant when she talked about attention. But it feels similar, or at least it feels right to me.
If the goal is not to solve problems and find solutions (left brain) but to be present and open to questions (right brain), then it makes sense to practice right brain activity in any way possible.
So when someone says that art, drawing, or music can make you a better person- that can mean that exercising your “right brain” builds up the muscles that help you pay attention.
This makes me wonder: “What kind of activities can work?” “Why don’t we do those activities more often?” “How does society, church, or institutions make it harder (or easier) to pay attention?”
How religion led my attention astray
As a child growing up, I was always attracted to the rituals of the church. I didn’t understand anything back then, but the church represented mystery, ritual, and wonder to me. It was alluring.
As I grew up, I wanted to get closer to the church and understand the mystery that enamored me so much as a child. So I tried to study it. I read up books on Catholicism. I went on to become a Theologian.
But I realized too late that if you want to kill your love for something, study it. There’s nothing wrong with a little knowledge, but it doesn’t end there.
It’s like trying to get to know someone by reading up about them, instead of spending time with them. You can learn a lot, but you won’t really know them until you spend time with them.
My experience of Catholicism now is fully left brain. Critical, always thinking, always using my judging mind
Lately, I have been feeling like I am on the inside of the church looking out. I don’t know why, but I find myself feeling like an outsider, like I don’t belong. But at the same time, I cannot just leave. I don’t think it’s that simple. And it is a strange feeling, because the church has always been such a big part of my life.
In the spirit of Weil’s attention, I am not rushing to solutions- I am doing my best to work on the problem. Like a math problem that is difficult to solve. And enjoying that puzzle
Why I think religion’s role is to cultivate attention
On top of my own problems with attention, it is difficult to stay in the church if I’m really attending to the reality of the world.
It feels like what happens in the church, or what church people care about is so small and trivial compared to what is really important and what really matters in everyday life. It’s not even about justice and the poor.
For me it’s a left brain vs right brain thing. I used to be a very logical, left-brained apologist. But the rhythms of my life took me to a right brained space. In a sense, I had to unlearn a lot of what I knew in order to find a new way of being in the world.
The church feels like it is stuck in the left brain. It is all about doctrine, and rules, and right and wrong.
I’m not saying that the church is irrelevant, or that it doesn’t have anything to offer. But it feels like it is so caught up in its own world, that it is missing the bigger picture.
It’s not just me. I know there are others who feel the same way. We are the ones who are struggling to stay, because we believe in the church, and we want it to be better. But it is hard, when it feels like the church is not really attending to the needs of the world.
–
I used to believe that you could study your way into a new way of becoming. Perhaps this is possible. I’ve certainly had ideas and analogies that were so powerful they completely changed the way I think about my world.
But most of the time, I think maybe 95% of the time, it is action that precedes thinking and belief. I think that way I think because of the things I do and who I am. We learn through our bodies. It is not abstractly in the mind.
We go on nature hikes, and our right brain wakes up- and we learn to see the world this way.
It is the difference between a tour vs a pilgrimage.
It is the difference between a zoo, a safari, and a mountain hike
It is the difference between music criticism and being at a concert.
This is what I feel religion is like.
When people say that they feel closer to God in the mountains, or in some far off wild landscape. They’re not being insane.
–
And yes I’m picking on religion because that’s my experience and it’s easy. But all of society has come to feel this way.
Civic organizations have become less about civics and more about tribalism, a bit of us versus them.
Countries used to stand for moral things, and the good of society. Now it also feels like an us versus them
Corporations are the same too- it’s just left-brained profit driven thinking. I think of food and agriculture, I think of reading, I think of writing. I think of universities. It feels like it’s everywhere.
And we’re not saying to remove everything and burn it all to the ground.
But it is a need to escape from the tyranny of the left brain, and open things up to a bit of more right brain experiences.
What Would Simone Weil Say About Religion and Society Today?
I’ve set it up pretty easy
She’d say to pay attention
And to wait and see
Yes I understand how naive this sounds. But hey I never said I was coming in to solve all these problems.
I’ve just writing what I think, and how I’m going to go about it.
The Outside of the Religion: Where Simone Weil Felt She Belonged
Simone Weil has the phrase that she feels like she’s in the outside of the church looking in
I feel like I’m in the opposite place
With utter frankness and humility, she positions herself between the inside and the outside. She surprises herself as much as she does us with her unfolding spirituality, her clarity regarding organized religion, and her union with God. At once lofty and down to earth, a (non-official) convert and critic, Weil is a kindred spirit to anyone who embraces the complexity of life on the periphery and receptiveness to the ever evolving mystery of faith.
Religion and Society on the right side of the brain
Whatever I don’t think we can really change society or religion
But maybe you can ask- what are those organizations- secular or religion that turn on the right side of my brain.
The interest in meditation
The hunger for some kind of meaning
It all links to this idea for sure
Simone Weil’s Legacy: On Attention and Living in the World
In Simone Weil’s thought, we need to be ready for the important things that are before us
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot
Four Quartets: Little Gidding
**
Footnotes
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For more on how this works in our brains, check out Drawing upside down ↩
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Left Brain, Right Brain: An Outdated Argument – Yale Scientific Magazine ↩