Ellington

New Year's Day, the SciFi channel ran a "Twilight Zone" marathon—the old black-and-white ones. I watched for a few hours because I love that they allow the weirdo host to smoke during his introductions and that they created most of the episode's eerie feelings with no special effects, whatsoever. After all, in this day and age, I can't leave the house without applying a hell of a lot of special effects to my own face.

In one episode, Dick York played a bank teller who could suddenly hear the thoughts of other people. This newfound skill caused all sorts of chaos at his job, and he was eventually fired for reporting another employee's thoughts. Dick did lose his job, but it wasn't all for naught. In the end, he got the girl, but only because he heard her thoughts and realized she had a crush on him.

This show got me thinking. Poet David Whyte says: "Part of the experience of being fully human used to be paying attention. Because if you weren't paying full attention to the moment, something larger than you was going to come along and eat you."

Whyte says we're less human today because everything seeks to distract us. Two of the scariest things in the human experience, the poet says, are paying attention and being yourself. The difference between us and nature is that we spend our existence attempting not to be what we are supposed to be, while the natural world knows nothing but simply being what it is in the present moment.

In the poignant speech Whyte gives about his book "Everything Is Waiting For You," he discusses the world outside ourselves that sits, waiting for us to pay attention, and through this paying attention, to discover everything we can be if we would just be ourselves in each single moment.

I equate the idea of "paying attention" to this "Twilight Zone" episode not because I think "paying attention" means being able to read minds, but more because the ability to hear someone's thoughts is a metaphor for being present in your daily interactions with others. The episode smartly illustrated how upset people can get when someone is present for them. I think most people don't want someone else to be aware of what's going on inside them. Thoughts like these have made me realize that "paying attention" is one of the things suffering in my own life.

The other day I was having a conversation with a friend, and I faded out. He spoke for three more minutes, post-fade out, before he noticed the drooling and far-away look in my eyes and asked me where I was. "Somewhere else," was my short reply. Surprisingly, he stopped and inquired where that "somewhere else" was. Taken off guard, I stated again, "Uh, just somewhere else." It wasn't that I didn't want to be talking with him right then. It wasn't that "somewhere else" demanded my immediate attention. It was simply the fact that I was so wrapped up in how cute he is that my mind took me dancing off somewhere else in a sexier outfit, throwing out wittier comments. I did that inadvertently, instead of sitting where I was, paying attention to what was going on in that moment.

Just think. If we paid attention, we might understand the reasons our significant others are angry with us. If we paid attention, we might realize all the ways we have wronged those we care about. If we'd simply pay attention and try to be who we really are, letting all the things we rummage about for so desperately and the other things we try to buy fall away, we'd finally begin to understand the one thing about ourselves most of us try to ignore: We are complete. I finally realized this is what David Whyte means by "everything." Everything is waiting for us to stop and pay attention to it. We don't have to buy everything; we already own it.

I know this sounds like something my dad would call "hippie crap." I thought the same way until a hippie-friend came into my life and helped me understand. It started with this one moment I was in the car driving to work. It was a beautiful day, one of the kick-ass Mississippi spring mornings where everything is fresh and scrubbed clean. The windows were down, and I was ready for the world. I wasn't thinking about what needed to happen at work that day or what I had to do afterward. I was simply thinking about the beautiful day and singing loudly with the radio. In that one second, I realized, "Right now, I am happy." I wanted to hold onto it desperately because it seemed so fleeting.

I started keeping count of these moments not too long ago and realized there weren't enough of them. The kind of moments where you make a baby smile and realize that life is about this one moment. The moments that are romanticized and kicked out of our lives when we are old enough to work. The moments violated by politics and policy and things that teach us we haven't the right to pursue our "everythings." The moments taken away from us in tiny increments by clocks and employers. If we begin paying attention in these moments, we may just be able to hear our own hearts whisper how much they want to fall in love with us again.

It seems like a tall order, right? David Whyte usually makes me feel as if I've been living life on autopilot. This is compounded by the fact that when I'm listening to him while driving up to Wendy's, and I hear his rich voice in the background, and the woman intones, "What would you like to order?" I have to catch myself before I simply state, "Everything … I would like everything." It's then that I think, "Maybe my regular lunch order has never been tall enough."

Previous Comments

ID

74302

Comment

Is this why when I don't wear make-up to my son's doctor appointment, the doctor says, "You might want to come by soon. I think you are suffering from seasonal depression?" So he's like, paying attention? Or pushing the newest pill? Always go for the tall. I'll remind you if you'll remind me. I should have bought the outfit today.

Author

emilyb

Date

2007-01-17T16:52:25-06:00

ID

74303

Comment

Lori, Thanks for this column--you're a marvel. This old hippie was delighted! I wanted to share a couple of quotes with you... Julia Cameron, in her book "The Artist's Way," wrote: "The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention." That quote is close to my heart. Here's another (same source) that's relevant: "Pain is what it took to teach me to pay attention. 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. In the exact now, we are all, always all right. I am breathing in and out. Realizing this, I began to notice that each moment was not without its beauty." Rock on...

Author

Ronni_Mott

Date

2007-01-18T11:27:30-06:00

ID

74304

Comment

Lori, as usual, this is thoughtful and provoking piece. Sorry my friend Kate and I said something earlier that merited deletion. I thought our comments were funny though. But I'm crazy.

Author

Ray Carter

Date

2007-01-24T13:30:49-06:00