A Velcro book that I bought by mistake

There’s a beautiful essay in Harper’s by Meghan O’Gieblyn. It is about addiction, self-loathing, secrets, willpower and other topics that I’d place in the “fiber” category of existence (life’s unappealing but inevitable roughage). She quotes a line from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” And then she (O’Gieblyn) immediately confesses that she doesn’t know how to pay attention. Or, “confess” is the wrong word. What O’Gieblyn writes is a self-accusation, and one that is demonstrably untrue—we’re reading the sentence in an essay that is proof of her capacity to pay attention!—and O’Gieblyn knows this, and she knows that the self-excoriation and sense of helplessness are no less vivid for being falsifiable from some Archimedean perspective that remains totally inaccessible to her…

Like O’Gieblyn, I often forget how to pay attention. And when I say “forget,” I mean in the same way I forget how to tie a slipknot or seal grout or anything else I do infrequently. The method just vanishes from my mind.

At this point I start thinking: “Ok Molly, try to remember, how do you pay attention to something? Is it a matter of looking at the thing? Or looking at it and touching it and listening to it? Or just looking at it, but for a long time? Or sketching it? Or putting it in your mouth? Or closing your eyes and trying to recreate it in your head? Or describing it in words? Or attempting to love it? Or does the method vary depending on the thing-being-attended?”

At this point in the rumination I become tachypneic, sunken with panic, red-eyed. The only recourse is to go see what my child is up to, because children are always paying attention. Unless they’re asleep, they do nothing BUT pay attention. So I stare at my child and am slowly reinflated with the knowledge of “Oh right, long ago I was a critter who paid attention involuntarily, like it was breathing or sweating, I did that, I will do it again, it is not beyond me.”

The best way to get good at attention as an adult, of course, is to increase your boredom threshold to the point where paying attention becomes its own riveting end. This is one reason nuns and monks live in seclusion and fill their days with tedious chores. For a non-nun living in a world of nonstop provocation and arousal, the practice of boredom is grueling and lonesome and probably futile. (But maybe it’s also that way for nuns. I haven’t talked to one in a while.)