Tag: philosophising

Paying Attention

Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, and then you must point it in the right direction.
As they say in the movies, ‘Careful where you point that thing!’
What you choose to pay attention to is the stuff your life and work will be made of.

Austin Kleon, Keep Going

I ran across that quote from Austin Kleon the other day, and it really struck me. The man knows what he’s talking about. (He really does. Go buy his books.)

In our world today, it’s become more and more important to point our attention in the right direction. If we don’t intentionally point it at what we want to pay attention to, it’ll be pointed for us, by an attention economy that is extremely expert at making us look where it wants us to look.

And what we pay attention to will fill our whole vision. If all, or most, of what we pay attention to is what’s bad in the world or in our life, pretty soon that becomes our life. It’ll be all we see. The world is a bad place to be, “they” are out to get people like “us”, everything is awful, and we spend our time wallowing in misery.

It’s not that there’s not plenty of bad stuff out there—there is. Or that there aren’t undesirable things happening in our lives—there are.

But listen to the language: paying attention. Spending time.

Because that’s exactly what it is. I have a finite amount of attention and time available. If I use up that attention and time on negativity, on things I dislike and disagree with, on matters that are bad and I can’t do anything about, that time and attention is gone. Poof. Kaputt. I no longer have it available to spend on the things that really matter.

What do I really want to spend the precious coin of my time on? What do I want to pay attention to?

“Do you want to be happy? Be grateful!” says Brother David Steindl-Rast of grateful.org. He’s not talking about “looking on the bright side”, or “trying to find the silver lining in the cloud”, let alone “shutting our eyes to what is painful and ugly and evil”. No, this is about attention: the attention to the surprise and wonder that surround us, every day, no matter where we are.

And I, for one, want to cultivate that kind of grateful attention. I don’t want to be miserable, thank you very much. Over and over I make the choice (at some times more successfully than at others) to spend my attention on the things that really matter, that matter to me. And once I’ve paid that attention, I find I have none left to spend on those other things, the ones that “they” want me to pay out my attention for and that make me upset and angry and depressed. Those things are still there, but I don’t have time for them; I already spent it all.

And that’s just fine with me.

“What you choose to pay attention to is the stuff your life and work will be made of.”

Life, the Universe, and Paying Attention. I want to choose my spending wisely.

Project Unstick: Holy Slippers!

Project Unstick advanced to the coat closet yesterday. And in amongst the random mess of mittens, scarves, sun hats, broken umbrellas, and dozens of mismatched stretchy gloves that were crammed into the shelf above the coat rack, I found a pair of slippers I knitted a few years ago. Unfortunately, something got into the stuff and chewed holes into the slippers, so they’re kind of useless now.

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However, they inspired me to dig up the blog post I wrote about knitting them, just a few weeks after I first started blogging. And re-reading it, I thought it’d be worth re-posting. Even though the slippers can’t be worn any more, the insight I got from the process of making them is still, dare I say, kind of profound-ish. Here it is:

27 August 2010

Lost Pattern

It’s raining today. And I’ve got a rotten head cold. So, instead of doing the headless-chicken impression that I had planned on for today (a.k.a. cleaning the house), I’m just going to do not-much-of-anything. I pulled out my knitting again, because to me, knitting is a bit of a not-much-of-anything activity. Stitch after stitch after stitch, bit by bit – it’s a very inefficient way to produce clothing. But as a meditation technique it has a lot going for it.

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Here’s a project I’ve had on the needles for some time. It’s meant to be a pair of slippers when it’s finished. A number of simple squares in garter stitch, attached to each other, rather like a scarf with a couple of extra pieces sticking out the sides. Then there’s supposed to be some rather complicated bit of folding-and-sewing trickery, attaching the corner of square number one to the edge of square number three-and-a-half and so on, and you’re meant to end up with something that keeps your toes toasty.

The only problem is that I’ve lost the pattern. I found it in a library book, and copied it out by hand on a piece of paper – I even drew the picture of how it’s supposed to look, and coloured it in with felt pens. I returned the book, knitted the first slipper (but didn’t sew it together yet) – and then lost the paper. It just went AWOL. And for the life of me I can’t remember what the book was called. So I know how to knit the piece – I can just follow the pattern of the first one – but I have no idea how it’s meant to be finished any more.

A lost pattern. But the project is still going. And working on it like that, without knowing if I’ll ever be able to really finish it, rather emphasises the zen aspect of the whole experience. I’m knitting for the sake of knitting, not for the sake of having finished slippers to wear at the end. It’s quite a useful discipline.

Isn’t it also rather like life, in some ways? We’re doing things a certain way because once, we had a pattern for it, we had a goal. Now the pattern is lost, but we still carry on doing it the same way, because now the aim of doing it has changed. Now I knit because I enjoy the sensation of the yarn sliding through my fingers, the slow rhythm of the needles poking, looping, clicking, poking again.

Actually, in the back of my mind, I still hope, faintly, that I’ll find that book again. Or that someone will know the pattern, and can tell me. Or that, in experimenting with the finished pieces, I’ll remember how it was supposed to go. So in working on that piece of knitting, I work on hope. Not anticipation – just a vague thought that maybe I’ll be able to finish this after all. But I won’t worry about it now. For now, I’ll just stitch. Bit by bit. Whenever I feel like it, or I have a head cold.

Life, the universe, lost patterns, and hope. I’ll let you know if the slippers ever get finished.

The slippers did get finished, thanks to a friend who commented on the post with a link to a pattern (here); and I wrote another post about that, too (“Loose Ends”, here). I didn’t wear the slippers much, but I do hope the moths or whatever it was that made the holes enjoyed their snack.

And now I want to sit down and knit some more… Maybe another pair of slippers? Or I could finally finish the scarf or the pair of socks I’ve had on the needles for a while. Not as long as the nine-year-sweater, though – but that one is a story for another rainy day.

Life, the Universe, and the Philosophy of Lost Patterns. Still something to be said for that.