Attentiveness

Attentiveness gives a familiar place new information

Your headphones have supplied the journey with an excellent soundtrack. Beside you, a passenger makes a small gesture toward the aisle. At first you file it away as part of the scenery. Then you look up: your bag has annexed the space in front of their feet. You lift it onto your lap, take off one earpiece and let them pass. The next verse can manage without you.

Finding the balance in Attentiveness

Look up from your headphones, notice a passenger trying to get past and move your bag.

Attention starts with being available to what is happening. One relevant detail can be enough to change what you do.

What Attentiveness makes possible

Repeated journeys make it easy to navigate while barely looking. A small return of attention reveals the present situation: someone wants to pass, a seat has become free, a familiar entrance has changed. You can respond before another person has to compete with your private world. The city becomes more intelligible because you are taking in what is actually happening.

Attentiveness in ordinary life

An obscured gallery sign

Before repeating your directions, check whether the flowers hide the sign from the visitor’s position.

A brief question

Hear which destination the person names before supplying your practiced directions.

Nearby virtues, different work

Compassion

Compassion responds to suffering; Attentiveness also notices ordinary uncertainty, interest and practical detail.

Gratitude

Gratitude appreciates a good received; Attentiveness makes that contribution, or another relevant fact, visible.

Self-Command

This scene deliberately reverses the bag encounter in Self-Command. There you respond to someone else’s obstruction; here you notice your own. The same shared journey can ask for restraint in one moment and fresh attention in the next.

Attentiveness and its counterfeits

The convenient assumption

Deciding that a gesture has nothing to do with you lets habit answer before observation. Look at the person and the space between you.

Watching as possession

Studying a stranger’s private details turns attention into intrusion. Notice what matters to the shared encounter.

How to cultivate Attentiveness

1. Look up when someone addresses or gestures toward you.

2. Notice what your belongings or position are doing in the shared space.

3. Let that observation change your next action.

Try it today

During a familiar shared journey, briefly turn your attention outward. Notice whether someone is trying to speak, pass or use the space beside you.

Questions worth returning to

• What has changed around me while I was absorbed?
• Is there a small request I have not yet heard?

Keep the practice proportionate

Notice practical circumstances without inspecting private screens, documents or conversations.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. He must adopt the whole case of his companion with all its minutest incidents; and strive to render as perfect as possible, that imaginary change of situation upon which his sympathy is founded.

   Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments · Part I, Section I, Chapter IV

   Smith describes the spectator’s effort to understand another person’s situation. Looking up from our own journey can reveal a practical detail we had missed, such as a passenger whose path our bag is blocking.

2. We often hear “shop-girls” spoken of. No such persons exist. There are girls who work in shops. They make their living that way. But why turn their occupation into an adjective? Let us be fair.

   O. Henry · The Trimmed Lamp, and Other Stories of the Four Million · The Trimmed Lamp

   O. Henry opens by refusing to let an occupation stand in for a person. The worker behind the counter has a life beyond the label; attention begins by leaving room for that particular person.

3. We realize, too, that social perspective and sanity of judgment come only from contact with social experience; that such contact is the surest corrective of opinions concerning the social order, and concerning efforts, however humble, for its improvement.

   Jane Addams · Democracy and Social Ethics · Introduction

   Addams wants judgment to be corrected by contact with actual lives. Attention becomes more useful when a person’s experience can change what we had confidently assumed.

4. He is a New Yorker born and raised, and in answer to my questions tells me about the life of a New York Park policeman, (while he talks keeping his eyes and ears vigilantly open, occasionally pausing and moving where he can get full views of the vistas of the road, up and down, and the spaces around.)

   Walt Whitman · Complete Prose Works · Specimen Days, Central Park Walks and Talks

   Whitman’s conversation with a Central Park policeman includes the man’s continuing attention to the surrounding paths. The detail shows how someone can remain sociable and available to what is happening nearby.

5. The passengers change as often in the course of one journey as the figures in a kaleidoscope, and though not so glittering, are far more amusing.

   Charles Dickens · Sketches by Boz · Scenes, Omnibuses

   Dickens finds variety in the passengers on a familiar omnibus route. Repeated travel need not make the people aboard interchangeable: the route is habitual, but the company keeps changing.

6. At first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations. Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.

   Edgar Allan Poe · The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Volume 5 · The Man of the Crowd

   Poe’s narrator moves from an anonymous mass to individual details. The story later turns that interest into intrusive pursuit and confident misreading. The useful distinction is between noticing a gesture and claiming to know the stranger’s whole story.

7. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of heroic vigils.

   Robert Louis Stevenson · Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers · An Apology for Idlers

   Stevenson argues that everyday observation can teach what formal study misses. The invitation is to meet the life around us with interested eyes and ears.

Continue through the catalog