35/100: Paying Attention

and what it might mean.

The photographer Spencer Ostrander posts a photograph of his son’s feet and lower legs, his partner’s right arm, half of the back of her orange swimsuit. It is a saturated picture, the hues of tanned skin, burnished orange swimsuit and milky blue sky perfectly graded, the eye drawn to the baby’s chubby right foot in the bottom right of the shot, the light perfectly bouncing off the ball of his foot, his left foot a shadow on his mother’s swimsuit.

It is summer in a photograph, so evocative it’s almost possible to smell the sunshine, to feel the sand out of shot, and although the beach remains invisible, it surely could not be taken any where else; it’s almost possible too to feel the care she picks the child up with, and the cool of the sea shortly after they walk down the hot sand towards it, the child’s eyes closing after for an afternoon nap. In short, it is the perfect photograph because it captures something up close that tells of something bigger. It is a picture of a small thing, but a thing that contains everything.

In the six days since this photograph was posted, I have thought about it every day. I have always loved small things. When I was 28, newly divorced and buying my own art for the first time, I bought a drawing that spells out ‘because everything is made from small things’ each letter constructed from miniature drawings of objects. I still have it.

For a while, the thought of small things forming the building blocks of something larger, helped keep me alive. Life was sparse. There was only me and my daughter in it. I didn’t have a clue what was happening next and worse, I didn’t know how to make the next happen. But when I bought this picture, I remembered an earlier time.

When I was 16, I took to bed for much of a year. That’s not true. That sounds almost romantic. Perhaps more accurately, when I was 16 it became too dangerous for me to leave my bed. Of course I did, but mostly to sit in the chair by the window. This window framed what I would now call a beautiful view, the hills I’d known since birth in the distance, fields in front of the house. Rural, peaceful; everything I didn’t want. The hills were the circumference of my world, I felt hemmed in by them, wanted to know what was over them, and once I did know, didn’t want to live without the outside over there. Anorexia is a complicated illness, which is an understatement, I’ve lived with it for 30 years and still don’t understand it, but the winter when I was the sickest from it, was the one that I learnt the trick of paying attention to the small things. There was nothing other than small things. The way the light hit the pine table in the morning, the twisting of a leaf as it fell, the blast of cold when I made it to the back door and stood under the porch by the wood pile, the scent of the drying logs in the air. It taught me to pay attention.

In Barry Lopez’s collection, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, he suggests that paying attention might be the most vital component to being a writer. Of course, we think we pay attention all the time, but this idea of paying attention began to concern me early this morning. I’d wakened some time around 5 AM, face down on the bed, the way I like it best, cool air finally on my bare back, the sheet cool too, and a beautiful birdsong coming in the window. I used to know all the calls, but so south here, I find I often am faced with foreign ones. At the beginning of summer, when I left a club in Soho, a cuckoo was singing morning, or so we thought, it was gorgeous, and likely impossible. It didn’t matter really, this morning, whose sound I heard, it was enough to hear it. I often find I am singularly incurious when it comes to naming the world. Leave it be, it exists regardless of what we call it. Soon, this one song was joined by more, and that, mixed with the traffic, made me think of getting up. Only, I like mornings in bed, I like to lie with my eyes closed for as long as I can, and think. Recently I realised my favourite thing to do is think. I’d happily swear off everything else in favour of it.

As I lay, I thought of attention. ADHD has been on my mind recently, and I lay and my mind beginning to attach itself anxiously to everything I have to do before leaving for 2.5 weeks away, I began to think of how ADHD gets a bad rap for being a deficit of attention, when sometimes it presents as a surfeit of attention. And then I began to think what it might mean to pay attention. The inclusion of pay in the phrase indicates a transaction, and every transaction is an exchange. What is traded in the giving of attention? What’s sacrificed? What’s gained?

Paying attention is a sustained endeavour. It is not easy. It is not as simple as noticing. It is not passing a glance at something. It is also, in many ways, a practise. In its most simplest sense, attention can be broken into attending to something, and here we have the implication of growing, of stretching towards something, its Latin roots are tendere - I can’t help thinking here of a tendril growing towards the light. To attend is to quest, which is to see and then to ask, it is then to grow; which is why it becomes the writer’s prerequisite or ultimate goal, without the growth of attention, without this dedicated paying of attention, how can we hope to see better or deeper or with a more acute sense. And how other can we see beyond ourselves than giving attention to what’s outside, to the small things constituting the whole. I have always been a fan of faces close up, preferring the parts of their sum, an eye, a mouth, a nose. I never forget someone’s hands. I think again of Ostrander’s picture, these fragments of his son, amounting to something far larger. Without attending to the smaller parts, we lose the ability to solve the puzzle, or at least see what the pieces are.

But this paying attention is not without its sacrifice. I often think I have watched more of my children’s childhoods than participated in them. When I tried to write life down, it felt as though I was behind a lens, watching more than being. Now I have turned my attention elsewhere, I physically miss much of their childhoods because I’m simply geographically elsewhere in search of all the tiny components of story. Sometimes, it seems like a poor trade, a worrying compulsion perhaps. But other times, it seems like all I can do. I see life the way I see it, small things outweighing the big things, small things amounting to a story, a book, a person; in my continued quest to pay attention - and the hope of becoming more attentive in the desire to be better at this - I have given up a lot, but gained I think a way of seeing the world, or a world I wouldn’t otherwise have noticed, and it is this attention demands and gives.