Monday morning cup of thoughts

on paying attention

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I'm reading the Artist's Way and doing the course. In my reading, I came across this deeply profound writing. I wanted to share it with you. I've omitted a few things and paraphrased slightly for brevity.

How do we stand the injustices in our lifetime?

Survival lies in sanity, and sanity lies in paying attention.

My grandmother knew what a painful life had taught her; success or failure, the truth of a life, really has little to do with its quality. The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is in the gift of paying attention.

The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain--the lost lover, the sickly child, the shattered dream. But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, "unutterably alone." More than anything else, attention is an act of connection.

In times of pain, when the future is too terrifying to contemplate and the past too painful to remember, I have learned to pay attention to right now. The precise moment I was in was always the only safe place for me. Each moment taken alone, was always bearable. In the exact now, we are all, always, all right.

Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty.

The night my mother died, I got the call, took my sweater and set out up the hill behind my house. A great snowy moon was rising behind the palm trees. Later that night, it floated above the garden, washing the cactus silver. When I think now about my mother's death, I remember that snowy moon. 

The poet William Meredith has observed that the worst that can be said of a man is that "he did not pay attention." When I think of my grandmother, I remember her gardening, one small, brown breast slipping unexpectedly free from the halter top of the little print dress she made for herself each summer. I remember her pointing down the steep slope from the home she was about to lose to the cottonwoods in the wash below. "The ponies like them for their shade," she said. "I like them because they go all silvery in their green."