Paying attention

‘To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.’

- Mary Oliver

We have all experienced coming across a word which is unfamiliar to us. Then we find we come across the same word shortly after. What seems to be happening is that our brain has made new links and has reset our focus. The things were always there, we just see them in a fresh way, they are brought to our attention. We can only focus on so many things at any one time. What happens when we have an emotional connection with something, is that we set up the neural pathways to short cut other distractions so that certain things come into our radar. We can use this to our advantage.

What we can take from this is that if we are serious about wanting to focus on hope, we make a point of looking for the good. This is not a rose-tinted, delusional way of looking at the world. It is more a case of keeping it in balance. We are hard wired to notice the bad things that might happen to us. Our ancestors needed to be alert to the physical dangers that might kill them or their young. Hyper vigilance is built into our systems as a survival mechanism. If our ancestors hadn’t spotted that lion lurking, they would have been dead meat. While that level of vigilance was helpful thousands of years ago, it is only helpful up to a point for us today. The sadness and the evil in the world are there as a matter of fact. Some of us experience a hefty dose of these. But life is more than that. It is as good as it is bad, as any complex structure is. So, we owe it to ourselves and to our wider experience of the world, to counter-balance the negative by practising noticing the positive.

Linked to noticing the positive, are expectations. Our expectations both for ourselves (I know I am going to enjoy this) and for others (they will be better than the last time I saw them) are a consequence of paying attention as much to the positive as the negative. It is a prosaic observation, but there are two sides to everything. The Janus door, the liminal, the yin and yang, the black and the white. To fully experience life, we need to be open to both. This is why paying attention to keeping an equal balance is important.

So, I can choose to notice that my colleagues were not as cooperative or as open minded as I’d have liked last time we met. Or I can choose to remember a time when they were fully on board. And perhaps my own attitude conveyed impatience and a rush to crack on. So, by thinking back to a time when things had more flow, when the expectations were high and there was a level of synergy, we are priming our attention to expect more of the same the next time we meet those colleagues. We are priming our attention on the times when we had the conditions we wanted as opposed to the times when they were less productive.

It is the same with children in the classroom. Yesterday, tempers might have been frayed, everyone was under par and things did not go as we would have wanted. Now we can choose to ruminate and worry about that, or we can think back to a few days earlier, when everything was buzzing, all were on task and it seemed as though anything were possible. This is how life is, sometimes the flow is there and everything is good, other times it goes off beam. This is not to say that the rotten days don’t matter, they do. But the good days matter too. And if we want more of the good days, it is important that we think about the good days and experiences let them fill our subconscious and let the power of these power us forward. Like petrol in a car, or a good wind behind us.

If we think about what is likely to happen if we pay attention only to the poor stuff which happened. When we meet our colleagues or our class the next time, these negative feelings are likely to be expressed in subtle ways: in our body language, in our tone of voice and in our expectations. What we expect is often what we get. For our colleagues and pupils on the receiving end of this, there are very subtle messages which are being conveyed. I am not in a good mood. I expect it will be the same as last time. What’s the point? They will pick this up, whether they can articulate it or not. But when we flip it on its head, the opposite becomes the case. We can do this, we can be better. Let’s leave the negative stuff behind. Because, there is more good than bad in this world. We just need remember to pay attention to it.