Attention Is Your Life Force: 5 Simple Ways to Reclaim Your Focus
You can’t fight what you can’t see
Have you ever had a moment — out of nowhere — when you find yourself doing nothing at all, suddenly hit by a sense of emptiness, a vague, aching loss? It’s like napping until 6 p.m. and waking to dusk, utterly alone.
That enveloping loneliness can happen anywhere. Maybe one second you’re talking confidently, and the next you sink into a void. I call that a loss of attentional focus. When we already have a relatively certain path of action for something, our thinking relaxes; our attention narrows to the outcome itself. But the outcome, to some extent, is a fixed thing — when expectations proceed without surprises, the mind can actually drift.
This isn’t to say that outcomes going exactly as planned are worse — far from it. There’s a real satisfaction when things fall into place. But if you lose attention to the process, the result loses some of its weight.
So how do we change that drift of attention?
Try noticing where you place your attention — because you can’t fight what you can’t see.
And bring your attention back to the present. The Art of Noticing by Robert Walker mentions many tips; here are a few I’ve been practicing:
01 Look up — then look up a little more
“If you want to see what you didn’t notice before, look up; it’s a great choice.” The book points out that looking up raises your gaze, lets more light into your eyes, and draws your attention to how land meets sky, how roofs are made, and the animals living in the treetops.
This summer, because I looked up more often, I caught many beautiful sunsets and the curved arcs of birds in flight. Ending the workday by looking up always gives me a little happiness — a feeling that things aren’t over yet; life is only just beginning.
02 Look out the window
Spend ten minutes noticing the view outside a window you usually ignore. Pick a window in your office or home that you pass by without remembering. Find three things you’ve never noticed before. Try to describe the scene in front of you and imagine what the world outside, beyond your control, is experiencing.
I’ve always liked designs that frame and hollow things out — they make possibilities. Different seasons and different light create different imaginings, and they shift your attention from a fixed result to the variety of the process.
“Windows are a powerful existential tool: all you can do is look, and you can’t choose what you will see. Your brain is forced to compose a story for whatever happens to appear; the mundane becomes uncanny.”
— Sam Anderson
03 Documenting their daily life without metaphor
Poet Marie Howe asked her students to write “Ten observations of the daily life” each week. It sounds simple, but it turns out non-metaphorical observation is hard. “We want to say, ‘it’s like this, it’s like that.’ To make our observations worth documenting we elevate them into more meaningful forms — resisting metaphor is not easy, because you must truly endure the thing itself.”
But if you set explanation aside and simply find a sensory way to meet the world — let go of ego and actually feel the world — the experience changes.
04 Find something to complain about
Take a constructively negative view: ask, what’s broken? Everything around us holds vast, hidden potential — potential that often goes unrealized because things remain unbroken.
Think of the English proverb “The elephant in the room,” which refers to an obvious, unspoken issue that everyone ignores. Recently, talking with friends about adult socializing, we noticed how people preserve appearances through mutually awkward interactions. That awkwardness spreads like an elephant through the room, yet everyone pretends not to see it.
Next time you feel that awkwardness, try saying, with a joke, “Are we feeling awkward here?” Use humor to deconstruct propriety and put down the burden that a social role imposes.
05 Cultivate silence
Challenge yourself for a day to say only what you must say. “We often miss what others are saying because we’re rehearsing the next sentence in our heads; the next silence becomes the outlet where we can express ourselves.”
But if we listen differently, you’ll find that the less you say, the more you hear.
As we come to see the facets of the “self” more fully and cherish our innate receptivity and sensitivity, habit still often pulls us unconsciously into life’s current.
Attention is like the tiny droplets in that current — we live inside it, but each droplet is different.