The Art of Attention: Choosing the Time that Remains
It’s never been more apparent to me than has been lately, this simple concept: Your proficiency in any practice comes in the attention you give to that practice. And further, that this attention comes to function as a compass for how to direct the time one has into a sense of creative fulfillment.
No doubt, this realization comes in large degree because I have recently flipped chapters in whatever this story is that I’ve made of my life. This year, 2025, will not be regarded for its number. I will not call it “2025.” I will call it “The Upheaval.” It’s why this particular flip feels so profound, and it brings with it a concrete awareness of the fact that I have only a couple more chapters left, if I’m lucky. At age 56 and recently divorced, I am acutely conscious of the home stretch, and along with this, how I want to live and what I want to give time to before the story ends. My priority has shifted from partnership to personal eudaemonia (and perhaps to admit that my failure in the former likely has something to do with its incompatibility with the latter). The danger of such a stage is in falling into self-preoccupation. But I don’t really feel susceptible to that. I thrive too much on the people around me. It really has to do with what I want to give myself to, what I want to give to myself and to others. I have no children, thankfully. I’m free from the guilt and responsibility of producing another person’s condemned state of Verfallen in a dying world. I want the satisfaction of tasks well-done in partnership with the wellbeing of others—my students, my bandmates, my colleagues, my friends, those who are close, tangible, accessible, those with whom I am gifted present durations of actual time.
So: attention. Another reason this word is in my mind is because I’m currently polishing an essay about how we attend to the nonvisual and the nonlinguistic across a range of biological life. One of my peer reviewers pointed me to science papers on how the brain’s temporal lobe attends to durations of “working memory” and how the prefrontal cortex gathers such brief durations of memory to signal decision-making processes. Profound personal attention shift + scholarship in attention has germinated thoughts such as: What do I attend to? What durations am I nurturing in my pFC? What “tensions” (in a positive sense) do I stretch, like muscles of a body that is both me and stretches out to encompass those around me? To what do I give time and care? If I have 15-20 good years of creativity, skill and mental sharpness left, what will I attend to and give care to?
Right now these muscles are very stretched. Currently, I tend to, and give care to, music (in particular, the process of conforming my mental and sensory-motor habitutation to the jazz form), scholarship (philosophical research and writing, recently shifting to ecological and political interests that overlap with my ongoing research on states of hearing and listening), teaching (my job, and my care for students who study under constant threat of violence).
The job gives me food and shelter and I’m blessed that I do care and that I can give care to my students. When I give this attention, it’s exhausting for this reason, particularly last semester when there seemed to be a tragic event every month. I don’t expect this to change in the coming fall term. I give a lot of my attention to this because I care.
My scholarship works my mind philosophically. It’s an attention that has become lonely and almost entirely inward, since I’ve lost touch with my PhD colleagues post-Covid. When I am attending to this, I do feel that it’s important. Not in a vain or self-important sense, but when I’m really, really attending to it, giving care to it over extended durations of time, I can get on such a roll that thought blossoms with little effort. Dare I say that I believe I’m onto something original? I’m working on an audible semiotics in a way that doesn’t currently exist and which I do feel is needed. In those moments of blossoming, it seems that I’m developing a conceptual ground for rethinking consciousness itself. Yes, I realize that reads as grandiose. I mention it for this reason, which is kind of the point: If I were to attend all my time to it, it might become something influential in a positive way. As it is now, it’s something like a fifth of my waking life. This limited attention means that nothing will come of it. My work in this area will fade into nothing. I’ve thought of giving this aspect up, not caring quite so much, except for the joy I take in mobilizing concepts into new ideas. I love the process of working through it. I love to write and my curiosity hasn’t faded a bit. It’s an attentive practice in which I’m not responsible for anyone else’s attentiveness in the moment of execution. To borrow from Nietzsche’s Dawn, writing allows me to navigate my own perches and flights. But it is also its own muscle, it requires a lot of attention to do well.
Which leads me to music. I spend 1-2 hours per day reorienting my mind and body to jazz. It’s not enough attention, not for Chiangmai. The music scene here operates at an incredibly high level of (I hate this word) self-improvement. Those around me here spend most of their waking hours working on and improving their craft. I know this because of how good they are and how much I see them grow. My 1-2 hours of attention is improving my playing and getting me some gigs, but I’m far from in-demand. To be an on-call player here, you have to give it all of your attention and all of your care. The musicians here tend to their craft. Understanding this, I really am lucky to be asked to perform at all. And as a benefit, I get to enjoy the skill and grace of those who do attend to it fully. The sheer variety of skills and styles here is breathtaking and I’m grateful for whatever degree I’m invited to participate. Music is also my social activity—not just friendships but a truly supportive community of others. Music performance is different from scholarship and writing in many ways. Notably, it’s not calming at all. There’s too much responsibility to those around me and their well-being. But if writing gives me enjoyment for expressing a sense of poiesis in a calming manner, music is a tense kind of attention that has just as much chance for poiesis, for an opening to newness in the moment. It’s a different duration, a different adventure, more risky, with more at stake in the moment of execution. I have to consider my brothers and sisters and their well-being in shared time. That gifting of time in uncertainty means that a duration of abandonment is possible at any moment, and those are the times when music is unlike anything in this world. That is real flight.
Several of the neuroscience studies I’ve been reading mention that the brain at its most attentive is primarily an organ of selectivity. Attention means choosing what to give one’s conscious thought to, what to hold on to, what to care for in thinking. Attention is a recognition that the vast majority of life gets filtered out. We can’t love everyone; we love what and whom we attend to and choose to care for. We choose love when the tension feels right, when the care is singular and deep, when its durations are immediate and exceed all others that surround it.
So what’s the point of all this navel-gazing? Simply a realization, not very original, that we can’t do it all and be excellent at the same time. But we can be good, we can enjoy the joys that come. The specialist or the multi-class character? Somewhere in between? I don’t have an answer. But in this reorientation from partnership to eudaemonia, I’m acutely cognizant of the dilemma and the privilege of choice. And I stand ready to recognize the arrival of a nudge in any direction.
And perhaps within all of this is an understanding of why I failed at marriage. Attention is a scarce resource. I’m happy to be “necessarily unattached” to anyone who might depend on me. One thing my wife said that has resonated in my mind for months: “I don’t have to worry about you anymore.” It wasn’t said in relief or bitterness, but I believe it was simply a statement of recognition on her part. I found it both deeply sad and oddly liberating for us both. I feel that sadness and liberation every day I wake up. The tension has been released. It is sad. It also opens new worlds. I realize how that might strike the necessarily attached, and they’d be right that I’ve chosen a certain kind of loneliness. But it’s not total. In any case, I will follow this detachment and attentiveness and see how this particular chapter plays out. I find myself for the first time looking (not so far) ahead to semi-retirement from the job in the years to come (having done my good deed for others), cashing in some social security checks and living on meager means. And from that point I can attend myself fully to nurturing whatever is closest to me. A front porch near a beach with a book next to me, a dog at my feet who is not entirely mine, waiting for that friend who promised to stop by today for a chat.