Attention is Like Water

This brief article comes from the "The Pulpit" - a monthly segment in the Radical Spirit Catalyst. See the site for more details or sign up here for the newsletter, which is mainly geared to allies in Northern California

Attention is like water – it brings life to whatever it touches. Whether it is a neglected child who is acting out in school, or a weary body thirsty for a vacation, everything that exists needs attention to thrive. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the universe is winding down, tending towards increased entropy. Attention winds the universe back up. It’s the turbine of evolution, the Godforce within us, creating businesses, families, communities, relationships, even social movements.

At times, I get annoyed with the fact that everything needs attention. The website is out of date. Bills are late. Friends have fallen off the radar. The plants are wilting. And the Ultra Important Project of the week still cries for more time. In such moments, I envision all of manifest reality as a giant baby, unable to care for itself, screaming endlessly for attention. And I am the parent, enslaved to take care of the baby’s needs until I’m spent.

In those moments, it is often ME that is not getting enough attention. I might need a massage or a walk or a long sleep. Or perhaps I need the undivided attention of meditation. Recently, I’ve been shifting my view of meditation to something akin to watering a plant. I used to be very intent on clearing old karmas, cleansing impurities, becoming more focused, refining my work plans, seeing the big picture or even raising my vibration rate. It was always goal-directed in subtle ways.

Recently, when I meditate, I feel more passive - like I am “watering” my soul and body with attention that has no particular direction in mind. I’m simply bathing my body and mind in raw, undiluted awareness, like a plant in the rain. In noticing the flux and flow of sensation, emotion, and thought, my capacity to give full attention to the rest of my life is then renewed. It reminds me of filing up the watering can at the spigot in order to douse the plants in the garden.

This month, I’ve been thinking more about how much actual attention I have – how much water is in the watering can? If I spread it too thin, everything wilts eventually from inadequate attention, including me. If I focus it too intently, I find myself impatient, wanting to see more happening more quickly. What do I include in the garden of my life, knowing that each and every thing in the garden will need attention in order to thrive and result in a harvest?

There’s an art to knowing precisely how much attention we have and therefore how much we can care for in our lives. There are times when that capacity expands and there are practices that help it expand. And there are times when it deflates. For some time, I was consulting on the development of six or seven projects but several of them wilted: not enough attention. Now, I am working on three main ones, and that seems to be about the maximum. One is even better, but the question is whether that one project or job can accommodate or require all the different kinds of attention I want to bring.

I’ve been noticing common patterns of attention in relationship as well. Devaa and I keep opening deeper and deeper layers of partnership. While our extended community often dabbles in polyamory, it seems impossible to go to the same level of depth with multiple people – there’s simply not enough attention for the relationships to blossom into harvest. Similarly with friends and community: how many people can be “close” friends? How many people can we have as casual friends? Acquaintances? Even simple tasks such as updating email addresses or conversing at a party take time and attention.

There appear to be typical relationship patterns that reflect how much actual attention we hav available. An inner circle of close friends is generally less than 10 or 12 (think of a wedding party). A community tends to stay below 120 ( for example, when co-housing communities develop beyond that threshhold, they tend to split into two communities). Finally, a network of acquaintances tends to max out around 1000-1500.

I don’t think these are arbitrary numbers but reflect something fundamental about the amount of actual attention we have. If we take them seriously, then we’re thinking consciously about WHO we are inviting into the garden of our life, how close to the center, and therefore how much attention we are giving the relationship. If a relationship starts to require more attention (positive or negative) than its position allows, then we need to draw a boundary or perhaps even let one of the people in a closer circle shift outwards to keep balance. Similarly, if someone is in an inner circle and we don’t consciously “water” the relationship with attention, it will tend to fade outward.

The same is true of possessions. I find it useful to think about literally everything we own as something that needs attention – even if it’s in a box in the garage, there will come a time when it needs to be moved or handled. And there’s a nagging tug at the edge of our awareness that it is “our” stuff. We are responsible for it. Ideally, we should be honoring it with our full attention from time to time. A certain Sufi school strongly encourages practitioners to ONLY have as much stuff as they absolutely need. Anything that we have in our possession that we are not actively using is a drain on our awareness.

When we move from accumulating things to thinking about each object requiring our awareness, then giving away what we don’t need becomes a natural and normal motion – it frees space for our attention for those things that are more important. It also frees the object to go to someone who might be able have the attention and desire for it. This allows us to take that much better of care of those things that ARE in our garden, as well as cut down on the number of possessions – all of which require resources to produce, maintain, and dispose of.

My hope in reflecting on these matters is that as I learn to respect the laws of attention, there is a more natural evolution towards harvest in all domains of my life, each in its proper time.