013: Attention as devotion
A practice of seeing and being
When I was younger, I used to associate attention with performance. To pay attention was to obey, to get things right. Teachers spoke of it in the language of control. “Pay attention,” they said, and what they meant was: fall in line. Stay alert. Don’t miss what matters to me.
But as I’ve grown older, attention has taken on a gentler tone. It no longer feels like a task, but a tenderness. Something quieter, more sacred. These days, I don’t think of attention as a discipline to be enforced. I think of it as a homecoming.
It often begins with something small: the glint of light on a glass, the weight of my own breath, the sound of distant footsteps on a hallway floor. Ordinary things, easily missed. And yet when I do notice them, something in me settles. My shoulders drop. The rushing slows. I remember I’m here.
I get up before everyone else. In the early mornings, before the city stirs, I sit by the window with coffee and watch the light shift on the buildings. I don’t check my phone. I don’t reach for distraction, not yet. I just sit. I let the moment unfold without asking it to prove itself. Sometimes this is only for a few minutes. These are the most honest parts of my day. I often feel like I’m Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above The Sea of Fog, but in a modern setting.
There’s no accomplishment in it. No measurable gain. But I leave that window feeling more whole. More human. As if a part of me I’d forgotten had quietly returned.
I’ve come to believe that attention is how the soul breathes. Noticing is not separate from devotion. It is devotion. To attend to this life, gently and without agenda, is to affirm that it matters. That we matter. Even in our most unremarkable moments.
"Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it."
—Mary Oliver
The quality of our attention shapes the quality of our days
I have a habit of staring at objects when I think. Not in a trance, but in that softened way children look at clouds. A book left open on a chair. The hands of another passenger in the subway and guessing their occupation. The faint shadow of a tree cast across a living room floor in the late afternoon. These moments, often small and unspectacular, have lately become the ones I remember most.
I used to think attention was just about focus. A tool for performance or the skill I needed to read another page, finish a project, get through an inbox. Over time, though, attention has begun to take on a different weight in my life. It feels less like a means to an end and more like an orientation. A way of being. At its deepest, it feels like a kind of devotion.
I don’t use that word lightly. “Devotion” belongs to the lexicon of the sacred. It implies reverence, tenderness, maybe even surrender. It’s not the kind of word people tend to use in work meetings or while scanning grocery aisles. But that’s precisely why I’ve been drawn to it. There’s something about paying attention with your whole self—not to accomplish, but to witness—that feels like an antidote to the distractedness of modern life. In a world that urges us to move faster, click more, and accumulate endlessly, simply noticing feels quietly radical.