Your Attention, Please!

YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE. The great spiritual traditions have all wanted us to pay attention to how we pay attention and to what. They've asked us to focus on what we focus on. Attention matters. Focus bring can bring us great good or terrible ill.

The philosopher and novelist Irish Murdoch even suggests in her little book The Sovereignty of Good that what we habitually pay attention to and focus on creates most of our ethical life. We build up through our focused attention, or lack thereof, structures of value and commitment that may or may not be healthy and helpful throughout our days. And when the time comes to make an ethically charged decision, the choice has often already been made by those freely but often unconsciously adopted structures of value and commitment.

Pay attention to what hooks your attention. Focus on what you habitually focus on. And ponder why. You may learn a lot as a result.

Fear and The Value That Overcomes It

A great profile of the novelist Marilynne Robinson in the New York Times a few days ago begins like this:

This June, as a grandfather clock rang the quarter-hour in her modest Iowa City living room, the American novelist and essayist Marilynne Robinson, a woman of 70 who speaks in sentences that accumulate into polished paragraphs, made a confession: “I hate to say it, but I think a default posture of human beings is fear.” Perched on the edge of a sofa, hands loosely clasped, Robinson leaned forward as if breaking bad news to a gentle heart. “What it comes down to — and I think this has become prominent in our culture recently — is that fear is an excuse: ‘I would like to have done something, but of course I couldn’t.’

Fear. It's amazing how often it holds us back, largely because we don't realize our own greatness, our deep resources, our resilience, and the magnificent purposes we can enact in this life. Marilynne Robinson is a believer in who we are, in our most fundamental souls. She's a religious novelist who has the rare, uncanny ability to depict goodness in compelling ways.

I wanted to bring this essay to your attention because I enjoyed it so much and I suspect you might, as well. In it, she says such things as:

“Being and human beings,” Robinson told me, “are invested with a degree of value that we can’t honor appropriately. An overabundance that is magical.”

It's good to be reminded of our astonishing core value, as human beings, in a world that often ignores it in so many ways, in favor of counterfeit values.

Robinson is a person who, learning her own value, and realizing the value that the rest of us embody, has not let any form of fear hold her back, but has launched out into a brave venture of writing that can show us, in subtle adumbrations, who we really are. And her honest boldness has garnered her both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Humanities Medal, in addition to many critical accolades.

Go check out her books here. I've started with Gilead.

I think you'd enjoy reading about her. It may spark a new sense of value in your life.

Today.

The Inner Circle Principle

Imagine life as involving a series of concentric circles representing your spheres of action and involvement. At the center is the inner and outer you. The next circle out is your family - both of birth and of choice - along with your closest friendships. The next circle yet is your neighborhood and your workplace. The next one out is your overall community. Then there is your state, or province, your nation, and the broader world, and perhaps even more.

Each circle, starting with the first, is to be tended to, nurtured, and grown in a healthy way, and is to be helpfully open to the next larger circles to come. We're never to get stuck in ego, or just in a family, or a neighborhood, or in a nation, in our sense of self identity and affiliation and value. As the ancient philosopher Diogenes once said, "I am a citizen of the world." Healthy self identity, and healthy affiliation at each level, is open to, and allows for, greater affiliations as well. Then, those come back and enhance the inner circles they encompass.

We're never to be stuck in any form of narrow thought that cuts us off from others. One of the biggest mistakes seen around the world is exactly that - an exclusivity of allegiance that turns others into threats and enemies. But, as my friend Vinod put it in a conversation we just had in the gym, "There are places where Sunnis work with Shiites in harmony and with shared purposes. This is how it should be." International business wants to bring the world together. International rivalries and exclusivist tribalisms want to pull the world apart. We can never fully flourish without being, in turn, tolerant, open, appreciative, and even celebratory of our differences. Tolerance is never enough, though it's the logical place to start, and hard enough for many people. But it's meant to be a door into a more positive understanding and appreciation, and even appropriation. We all have insights. And we all have errors. We can learn from each other. And we need to, in order for things to go well.

But of course, when we speak of being tolerant, open, appreciative, and even celebratory of others, we don't mean that we should ever embrace what strikes our most enlightened moral sensibilities as just wrong or unjust. What we're to learn from each other should never take us to a worse place, only to a better stage in our own understanding and sensibilities.

I hope you'll go through the day with an enhanced appreciation of all your concentric circles. You are a citizen of the world.