Pay Attention
I follow the work of New Yorker cartoonist, Liza Donnelly, and have been watching her drawings of tiny, quotidian moments in the lives of New Yorkers. This drawing arrested me with both its simplicity and its detail: the tilt of the dog’s head, paying attention to Liza as she draws, the man, eating a sandwich. She writes:
“To me, life is about the small things, the individuals. New York City is made up of so many wonderful individuals, in fact it’s what makes the city.”
The other day when I was trying to meditate, instead of letting my thoughts float by, I was caught by a deep longing to have work like Liza’s, work that demands that I simply stay still and pay attention—to be absorbed by others, by the poignant beauty that makes us human. Then I thought, but of course I do! Everyone is allowed to, invited to, pay attention to the world around us. My work is all about connecting with others. How can we possibly connect with others if we don’t take them in?
I’m reminded of the wonderful Mary Oliver “instructions for living a life:”
“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
My dad loved the phrase, “first class noticer.” He told me the story of how he first fell in love. He was in high school in LA and there was a French exchange student named Francoise. He knew he was in love because he noticed everything about her: the way she ate soup, scraping the spoon in the bowl, the furrowed brow as she tried to conjugate on the fly and recall vocabulary words. To him, noticing, paying attention, is inextricable from loving.
So this morning as I walked the dog, I actively took others in. I looked with an open heart at the men donning their hardhats and unloading heavy ropes from the truck; I looked with curiosity at the woman in work clothes and bare, stockinged feet, talking into the air, hearing unheard voices in her AirPods; I paid attention to the masked driver letting me cross the street; I noticed the cool air, the smell of car fumes, the dying grass…and I broke into tears. The walls that I’ve been building, slowly, brick by brick, became startlingly visible. Layers of defense I hadn’t even known they were there. I find it hard to contemplate the beauty of a tree without the intrusion of despair for our planet. I find it hard to put aside judgements when taking in another person.
This week, take a little time, whatever you can tolerate, to notice. Without judgement. Without fear. Give yourself permission. We are all invited to witness our world with wonder.