Too little
Seeing only the attraction
Just a moment; this is beautiful.
Your interest makes another person’s ordinary passage invisible.
Attentiveness
The ceiling is splendid. Your suitcase is in the doorway.
A considerate readiness to notice what merits attention.
Attentiveness notices what merits care in the present situation. A visitor may be absorbed by what is new while overlooking the ordinary movement around it. Attention can include both the beautiful detail and the person trying to pass beneath it.
Attentiveness gives enjoyment that leaves a doorway clear
You stop under a decorated ceiling, following every curl of a painted leaf. Behind you, someone pauses at the doorway. Your suitcase has become an unofficial admission barrier. Pull it beside you and make room, then look up again. The ceiling will not resent sharing your attention with the entrance.
Finding the balance in Attentiveness
An illustrative everyday situation
Notice that a suitcase blocks a doorway while admiring a ceiling, and move it aside.
A fitting response
Noticing the shared place
Let me move this out of your way.
You preserve the pleasure while attending to its effect on others.
Pursued too far
Watching every reaction
I must detect every possible inconvenience.
Vigilance displaces the encounter and asks more than anyone can know.
Attention widens a moment without requiring you to notice everything.
When the situation changes
When access needs are unclear, leave usable room or ask a simple question. Do not infer a stranger’s needs, history or character from a glance.
What Attentiveness makes possible
A shared place can become more intelligible when you notice how people use it. This may change where you stop, how loudly you speak or what you photograph. You remain a participant with your own needs, not an invisible observer.
Attentiveness in ordinary life
The group photograph
Before stopping for a picture, look at the route others are using. Find a place to gather that leaves it open.
A companion’s unfinished sentence
A display catches your eye while your companion speaks. Return to what they were saying instead of supplying an automatic answer.
Nearby virtues, different work
Fairness
Fairness considers competing claims to space; Attentiveness first notices that another claim is present.
Curiosity
Curiosity pursues what you want to understand; Attentiveness also receives what you had not thought to ask about.
Attentiveness and its counterfeits
Counterfeit: Collecting details
Photographing every feature can resemble Attentiveness while keeping you from noticing the living use of the place. Genuine attention can change your conduct.
Counterfeit: Reading strangers
Assigning motives from someone’s expression can pass for insight. Genuine Attentiveness distinguishes visible cues from stories you invent.
How to cultivate Attentiveness
Pause where you can do so without blocking passage.
Notice one use of the place that your original plan omitted.
Adjust a small action when an actual need becomes visible.
Try it today
Attention does not require surveillance, constant vigilance or guessing another person’s private circumstances.
In a shared space, notice where you and your belongings are positioned. Make one useful adjustment if needed, then return to what you came to enjoy.
While visiting an unfamiliar place
Notice whose path your enjoyment may be blocking.
Questions worth returning to
What is happening just outside my preferred frame?
What small adjustment would let both activities continue?
Keep the practice proportionate
Attention does not require surveillance, constant vigilance or guessing another person’s private circumstances.
About these practices · DisclaimerQuotations and further reading
Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.
There is an individuality in every prospect, which remains in the memory as forcibly depicted as the particular features that have arrested our attention; yet we cannot find words to discriminate that individuality so as to enable a stranger to say, this is the face, that the view.
A view has particulars that a generic description misses. Attention lets an actual place correct the picture carried in advance.
The learned Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris,—from Paris to Rome,—and so on;—but he set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he pass’d by was discoloured or distorted.
Sterne’s satirical traveler colors every sight with his own grievance. Attention asks what the place contributes beyond the mood brought to it.
Well then, ought you not to play with attention?
His question includes play within the scope of attention. Enjoying an outing does not make its effects on shared space irrelevant.
It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.
A remembered account should answer to the present place. Looking again can reveal a change that an old guide or earlier visit concealed.
Owing to the heat of the day, luncheon was generally a silent meal, when people observed their neighbors and took stock of any new faces there might be, hazarding guesses as to who they were and what they did.
The hotel guests observe others and immediately invent accounts of them. The scene distinguishes noticing visible details from knowing a stranger’s story.
It requires so much closer attention to the habits of the birds, that, if for that reason only, I have been willing to omit the gun.
He describes watching birds without the gun as demanding closer attention. Observation can become fuller when acquisition stops being its purpose.
From those who mark the divisions on a scale to those who measure the boundaries of empires or the distance of the heavenly stars, it is by careful method and minute, unwearying attention that men rise even to material exactness or to sure knowledge even of external and constant things.
Stevenson describes the attention required even for knowledge of external things. Noticing a doorway’s actual use asks for a similar willingness to look beyond the first impression.
Continue exploring
Take these ideas into everyday life
Read freely, follow the fifteen-virtue program, or adapt this collection in My Virtues. A local outing can be enough.