I’m finishing a couple-month break from blogging, giving myself some space and time from the overly inward exercise of writing. I needed to get out of myself and focus on the outward aspects of life. I needed to reduce the number of things going on in order to pay adequate attention to the rest.
As I return to writing, I return with a deeper desire to practice attentiveness in my life. There are far too many things that are poorly attended to not just because the world around me throws so many distracting things at me, but because my practices lead to a muddied existence of too many things blended together.
I need to pay attention to one thing at a time, one person at a time.
As part of my practice of attentiveness, I bought a turntable. Yep, one of those things you play records on.
I realized that music had become merely a background soundtrack, and I was missing out on so much beauty because of it. During many years of my life, I dedicated time to sitting and listening to music with rapt attention, soaking in sounds and details. I was a completist, buying every album and rare single by artists I loved. I had to have it all as I immersed myself in these sonic worlds.
But over time, music became something I listen to in the car as I drove from one place to another. And with streaming services like Apple Music, I found myself no longer giving adequate attention to any album. I wasn’t spending money on particular albums and so didn’t feel like I was invested in them. So, if an album didn’t click with me (while I drove from one side of town to the other), I moved on from it. To combat this, I pulled out old CDs last year and committed to listening to just one album at a time, from start to finish. I’d only listen to one CD for a minimum of two weeks, sometimes extending it to an entire month, mimicking what I used to do back in my college days.
That was a good start at redeveloping attentiveness. But it wasn’t good enough. I was still distracted. And even though I was being intentional about what I listened to, I simply couldn’t give full attention to something while driving safely (and often engaging in a conversation with a passenger while doing so).
I needed a turntable. I needed my music to be confined to one room in my house. I needed the requirement of stopping everything else, of sitting down in one particular place, of turning my full attention to one thing.
Now, I don’t know if vinyl records really sound better than CDs, but the experience has been absolutely amazing. I’m hearing music as if for the first time. The nuances that musicians and their producers put into carefully crafted songs are right there and I kick myself for not noticing them before.
It’s possible that there really is a warmth to vinyl that isn’t there in purely digital offerings. Vinyl purists stake their lives on it. What I do know is that I had opted for lower quality digital versions on my phone in order to save space. And watching kids listen to music on YouTube, with its horrible quality, almost grieves me. We have all of this amazing tech in our hands, but it’s led us to sacrifice far too much for cost and convenience.
It’s like we’re swilling cheap bilge-water wine when we’ve got the good stuff at hand.
Music is just one area of life where I’m trying to pay more attention. I’m trying to do it everywhere as well.
I’ve recommitted to not scrolling through my phone or even reading a book or a cereal box while eating. I want to taste my food. Really taste it. I don’t want to shovel it down to satisfy an appetite. I want to savor it, pay attention to it, notice all its flavors. And if I discover that I’ve been eating aesthetically flat food, then I want to replace it with better food.
What hit me with this was watching a doctor lead a meeting at the hospital where I work. He had a protein bar that he would cram into his mouth whenever he didn’t have something to say. Not only wasn’t he taking the time to stop and rest while eating, he certainly wasn’t paying any attention to what he was consuming. I watched in horror as he did this day after day, meeting after meeting. Not tasting. Not resting. Not savoring.
When we don’t pay attention to the food we’re eating, we don’t just risk over-eating and disrespecting our bodies. We risk devaluing the food itself, especially when we’re eating meat and an animal had to die to provide us with our sustenance.
I want to honor both the source of the food and my body whenever I sit down to eat.
I don’t want to be rushing from one place to another. I don’t want to have my mind half a world away. I want to practice attentiveness.
Music and food are both important sources of beauty in our lives if we attend to them. But even more important that those are the people in our lives and especially the ones we claim to love. But how often do I find myself unsure of what a family member just said because I wasn’t paying full attention to her, because I was paying more attention to my phone than my family?
My addiction to my phone is easily the greatest source of inattentiveness to my family.
I highlight that because it’s the God’s honest truth. I hate to call myself an addict to anything. But I’m not so self-deceived to not call my craving for my phone anything but addiction.
I want to think about my family more than I think about my phone. I want to be more bonded to them than to it. I want to pray more and scroll less. Yes, the people on Facebook and Instagram are real and I feel a connection to them, but what about the people right in front of my face?
For the last three weeks, my wife and I directed the Training in Christian Living program at Lakeside Bible Camp. During this three-week discipleship intensive, upperclassmen in high school turn in their phones and turn toward God and each other as they serve the camp.
Part of the program includes scheduled one-on-one conversations that typically last about half an hour. Before smartphones, the TCL program used to have one per day. But now, the kids are requesting two and three per day. This is such a novel and rich experience for them that they can’t get enough. For many, it’s the only time in the year where they get to talk with someone with no phone in sight. And they’ve discovered just how hungry they are for this kind of unbroken, undistracted, attentive interaction.
We do the same thing with prayer and reading the Bible. And they find that God is right there, ready to be heard, ready to be engaged. They just needed the time and space to be attentive to him.
As a chaplain at a hospital, at the very center of my job is attentiveness. I pay close attention to the patients I visit with, listening as deeply as possible not just to the words they say, but to the feelings behind the words, the setting in which they speak them, and the stories of their lives from which they speak. I pay attention to God. I pay attention to myself and my reactions. I strive to be fully present.
Why wouldn’t I want to do the same with the rest of my life?
Who wants to live a noisy life where nothing stands out, where all is lost in a sea of information and sound and sensation?
Each moment is a gift. Each taste is to be savored. Each person is a unique image-of-God being of infinite worth to be honored.
Pay attention.