“Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds
of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder
or a safe spare tire?”
~ Tony Hoagland
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Life is a beautiful thing.
Just take it all in and breathe,
breathe, breathe.
~ Creola Johnson
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The real magic happens when we become intimately familiar with the moment-by-moment experience of being alive. Instead of trying to force complete experiences to happen. I focus on setting the stage for them to happen by exercising my attention.
When remembering to notice that we're alive becomes a habit, we begin to erode the internal friction that obscures our view of the richness we're swimming in every day.
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I've shared strategies for using movies to strengthen attention. Just as in ordinary life, what makes tending to the sensory components of a film so challenging is the pull of the narrative. But what would it be like to focus on the changing sights and sounds without having to resist the gravitational pull of story elements?
Starting today, you can find out.
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"The idea that reality is not real or what you sense and feel is not authentic is something I’m very skeptical of."
~ Bill Nye
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"I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent."
~ Lisel Mueller
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Any perception you can observe directly in real time can be used to train a variety of attention-related skills.
I like to make a game out of turning ordinary activities into opportunities for practice.
There are a number of exercises I use when watching a film — whether it’s one I enjoy, dislike, or have seen before.
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"It felt like my senses were being used in a way that I ignore them a lot."
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"Although emotional sensations can arise anywhere in the body, they are much more likely to arise in the belly, chest, throat, or face. These are the emotional hotspots in the body, the regions where emotional sensations can get huge. That means that other areas are much less likely to host gigantic emotional sensations, which turns out to be a useful and convenient thing."
~ Michael Taft
Read MoreThe universe began with our eyes closed.
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"When blind people learn to see, sighted people seem inspired to want to learn to see their way better, more clearly, with less fear, because this exemplifies the immense capacity within us all to navigate any type of challenge, through any form of darkness, to discoveries unimagined when we are activated."
~ Daniel Kish
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yù yī - 玉衣
n. the desire to see with fresh eyes, and feel things just as intensely as you did when you were younger—before expectations, before memory, before words.
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"Creation seems to come out of imperfection. It seems to come out of a striving and a frustration. And this is where I think language came from."
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"This is just simply asking, again, as if we had arrived for the first time, what is the relationship of the human project to time and space?"
~ Antony Gormley
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It seems like stepping outside for a walk should be enough to clear our minds, but when we head outdoors, our attention tends to stay anchored in our heads. What we need is a practical focus strategy and more realistic expectations about how our minds respond to such a challenge.
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When you catch yourself absorbed by some immediate aspect of your environment, try to yield to the observation fully for a few seconds.
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A son and his father, I knew
from their looks, the son with his
right hand on the handrail,
the father, left hand on the left,
and in the middle they were
holding hands
~ Ted Kooser
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I swoon and recoil at the tresses blowing
in an arbor without glow
or flame. These are reprieves. Respites
in the demands of sensation
and flow. Know this: you can you can
you can you can you can.
~ Margot Schilpp
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