Pay Attention

Okay, but how?

It’s a good question because the request begins around age three and never stops. There’s just one glaring problem with this ever-popular demand. No one ever tells you HOW to do it.

All eyes on me.

That’s the closest we get. Or, listen to me. Both communicate paying attention as an externally based event. Me, me, me!

Well, yes, yes, yes! Except, sadly, no.

I am a frequent culprit of this tactic to initiate compliance.

The problem is, it leads directly to what I have referred to before as the circular learning curve. This is where we repeatedly employ the same strategies hoping this time they will generate different results.

They don’t. The reward charts, incentive charts, promises, threats, bribes, long-term negotiations– all short-term solutions. Ask any parent or educator.

Plus, there is the added disadvantage that asking children to continually focus on what WE want them to, on our right NOW-ish timetable, paralyzes their ability to build SELF-awareness and regulate impulse control.

It bypasses emotional stability.

Because they aren’t encouraged to check in with their own thoughts, feelings and physiological cues, so, they don’t feel grounded in personal truth.

Sure, it may appear, given their seemingly dramatic outbursts, freak-outs or disassociated apathetic states that they’re fully in touch with their feelings.

Perhaps, too much.

But this is an illusion. The intense emotionality is leftover secondary by-product reactions caused by enduring too much.

Too much stress.

Too many expectations. Too many requests. With no help on HOW to handle it all.

Didn’t you ever feel this way? I know I did, for like my whole childhood. And yet now as a parent I seem to keep forgetting that our children are not Nike commercials.

They cannot Just do it when no one has told them how.

We teach them how to play tennis, baseball, add, subtract, use manners and eat with silverware.

Yet when it comes to paying attention we think it should somehow be innate, that they should just know how to do it.

But did we? Do we?

It was not until my mid-thirties that I began to understand self-awareness as more than an understanding of likes, dislikes, attributes, strengths and weaknesses– as more than my resume or biography.

Only now, in my forties am I beginning to awaken to what it means to be aware.

Growing up the faster I reacted to a request the better off I was.

Speed was synonymous with success. It was a sign of intelligence. The faster someone could answer a question, the more they ‘knew their stuff’.

Except I was never that person.

I was the kind of person for whom every question was a multi-dimensional vortex of associations and tangential possibilities.

There was never a simple or singular answer.

And the myriad of alternatives and metaphorical opportunities was overwhelming.

There are, of course, different kinds of intelligence. It seems in this country we value neck and above the most. In this arena speed does in fact matter. Whoever gets the answer first wins.

Emotional and spiritual intelligence however require consideration and time.

And no one wins. 

Winning is accomplished simply by being committed to the exploration as a lifetime adventure. Only the ones who don’t race through it, don’t treat it as a goal to be accomplished or a box to be checked get to experience this kind of intelligence.

This is a tall order for people (like me) most familiar with the race your ass off strategy. But it sure does feel way better to go slower. And the more I slow down my thinking and become aware of my thoughts and feelings the clearer it all gets.

We need to be attuned.

You can’t play guitar without tuning it. It sounds off. It doesn’t matter what you want from IT. IT cannot deliver unless you attend to ITS needs. And the conditions that make the strings warp are copious.

Temperature, humidity, sunlight.

Our mind, bodies and spirits have similarly temperamental and continually changing weather patterns too. We must tune into ourselves and listen to these subtler nuances if we are to play our lives like the beautiful music they are.

I am not religious but I gratitude, love and curiosity are my church and in this regard, I think perhaps…

Paying attention is a form of secular prayer.