On Attention

Essay 10

The older I get the less Freudian I am. No, I don’t have hidden motives: my motives consume me and come forward to rule me and hold constitutional conventions, and they become motifs. The vines that shape the selves, they twine one year to the next, and everybody can see it, and who are we kidding.

I stopped looking for my happiness in the depths where things are lost, the ditches into which the half-finished palaces collapsed. What I see makes me happy: I point my attention, I take it to places, and those places are serene.

There is a secret to how deep the attention should drill for happiness to sprout. I have a tendency to dwell on things that don’t grow, as if my waiting was the surgery the world needs, as if my attention was not an instrument but an end—metal, inorganic, not of us.

A person’s happiness depends on where her attention rests. The fact that we can choose where we move it is befuddling. A caress on the world in which you move and not a stab, finding the right layer of the soil to seed, a fiddle stays in tune, the horse that should always feel you’re riding it but should never be restricted or stalled.

I’m learning how to graze my happiness on what I sowed.