Practicing Fluidity of Attention

In 2005, Walker, my father, and I explored the red rock canyon country of southern Utah. We delighted in hiking through the strangely shaped formations, sometimes fantastic, sometimes whimsical. They fired our imaginations.

As I write this, I am in a plane, flying over the same country; red sandstone canyons are spread out below me in majestic patterns that reflect a story hundreds of millions of years old. Geology is revealed. From space, we can imagine it would look still different, perhaps a small reddish brown patch on the surface of our mostly blue and white Earth. We shift our perspective dramatically by moving to different vantage points.

In the blink of an eye, depending on how I orient my attention, I can experience myself as sitting in the airplane seat next to my wife, as hurtling through cold thin air in a fragile aluminum tube six miles above the ground, as traveling across a red landscape that slides past my window, as moving ever so slowly across one tiny corner of the Earth’s vast surface, or as being part of the Earth itself as we spin together through cold empty space.

In our North Carolina retreats, we discover how fluid our attention is, and practice how easily we can shift perspectives. We build this fluidity. In so doing, we become less attached to a particular view of things, and more able to access a perspective that is helpful at any given moment.

Try these time shifts to practice this fluidity. Orient your attention to the time of day you are reading this. (For me, right now, it’s 1:05 PM, shortly after lunch.)

Now, orient yourself in a calendar year. (It’s late January, the holidays are long gone, it’s a couple of weeks after my birthday, we are going on a trip, and significant events are approaching.)

Now, orient yourself in the timespan of your life. (For me, well past the half-way point, with fewer years to come than I have already lived, and the sense of quickening pace and the preciousness of my remaining time.)

Now, orient yourself at the leading edge of a 13.7 billion year evolutionary process that began with the Big Bang and now finds us at a precarious point in the story of life on Earth. Feel this in your bones. (For all of us, at the edge of the evolutionary story.)

Each of these perspectives is true. And, each informs us in unique ways, contextualizes our activities and our commitments differently, and directs us to different actions. At 1:05 PM, it feels important to finish this post so Jenny can get it out. On January 24, I know to submit proposals for a June conference in Chicago. At age 58, I have sweet urges to tell my wife of 27 years that she is a gift to me, and that I love being with her. And, at the leading edge of a 13.7 billion year long story, I feel called to orient my work towards the evolutionary shift that is critical for us all to make if we are to not be toast.

Which perspective is most helpful? All of them, really. Modern life tends to constrict our view. Responding to, say, the daily flux of emails narrows our sense of time, and insulates us from the more inspiring and generative perspective of our role as authors of an evolutionary shift. When we reside solely in this more constricted view, we are deprived of a narrative of relevance, and we organize around narrow actions that generally do not provide us with fulfillment or meaning.

It is life-affirming to develop our access to all of these perspectives. When we practice expanding the fluidity of our awareness, we become more creative and resourceful, and we live in increasingly bigger contexts that provide a deeper relevance and meaning for our actions.

• How does the perspective of the time of day affect what you feel you should be doing?
• How does the perspective of the time of year affect what seems important?
• How does the perspective of where you are in the trajectory of your life change how you see?
• What are you being asked as a co-author of a 13.7 billion year old story that is still being written?
• And, what commitments might you make from each of these perspectives?