So Worthy of My Attention
Last week I began an exploration on the topic of gratitude in response to a conversation with a friend, Jane Buchanan. Jane responded to my thoughts with some further ones of her own. She wasn’t, she said, so much thinking about finding moments of gratitude—we all do that almost inevitably—but asking a larger question. How it is possible to learn to live in gratitude? Which raises the conversation to a different level.
As contrary to first-glance logic as it may seem, living in gratitude begins for me with recognizing—truly believing in—my own mortality. When I taught high school English, long, long ago, I remember once saying to my students that it is the inevitability our deaths that gives our lives value. And I remember their astonished skepticism. They thought I was nuts and told me so.
I should have known better, I suppose. After all, seventeen-year-olds and death exist in separate universes. Besides, I remember my reaction to my own high school English teacher when she told us that the 17th-century English poet John Donne, making the same point, slept in his coffin each night. Our response? Totally weird!
But think about it. Stop to really think. If you knew for certain you were going to die in six months, six weeks, tomorrow, how would that change your relationship to the moment you are in now? What would you care about? What would you pay attention to?
(There is an app, by the way, called We Croak that promotes this very idea. It sets your phone to remind you of your impending death five times a day, along with appropriate quotes. Here’s an example from Susan Cheever, “Death is terrifying because it is so ordinary. It happens all the time.” Or this one from Francis of Assisi, “Remember that when you leave this earth, you can take with you nothing that you have received—only what you have given: a full heart, enriched by honest service, love, sacrifice and courage.”)
All of which brings us back to the simple answer I could pull up last week, the one articulated in so many different ways by the poet Mary Oliver. The key to gratitude, the key to truly living our lives, lies in paying attention:
Instructions for living a life
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
How valuable each moment would be—every single one—if we lived those moments with the gut-deep knowledge of how temporary we are!
Learning to pay attention requires practice. And discipline. Babies seem to do it naturally. Have you ever watched one entranced by a sunbeam? So do our cats and dogs. But you and I have lost much of the capacity for that kind of devoted attention. In fact, we’ve been trained out of it. And something else … if what we’re really talking about isn’t just attention, but joyful attention, we’re all born with different brain settings for happiness. Neuroscience has established that.
Studies have shown that within a year of winning the lottery or becoming paraplegic a person is back to the happiness level they inhabited before their windfall or loss. And further studies establish that, by being very intentional, we can improve our happiness level … but only by about ten percent.
I don’t know how to identify the setting for my “happiness level,” but I suspect it’s not very high. These days, in fact, I wake each morning with an end-of-the-world feeling in my gut. It takes an hour of meditation, the profound pleasure of a good cuddle with my partner, the love of my dog, and a satisfying breakfast before I can begin to bring anything like attention to my day.
As I grow older, as I become more of who I already am, I’m beginning to learn not to beat myself up for my brain’s being set the way it is, for my past having formed me as it did. That’s just the place I’m given to start from. After which I can work on that ten-percent improvement. Maybe I can even beat the odds and make it eleven percent! Or thirteen!
Mostly, though, I want to remind myself, as many times as it takes, to pause, to notice, to embrace. To fill myself with my life as it is, with the world as it is … so glorious, so painful. So worthy of my attention.
It’s the only way I know to live, as deeply as possible, in gratitude.
And again from Mary Oliver:
The Summer Day
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I’ve been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
