On Paying Attention

The other day I took a walk. Well, I got in my car and drove to the place where I like to walk: the three-mile loop near my family’s home. If you like Georgia Piedmont ecology: leaf litter; oak trees; dogwood; the occasional deer — this is the place for you. Though, be warned — the landscape is not quite the exemplar. It’s hard to keep deciduous charm where there’s a disc golf course. The trail still offers plenty of variation: scrub density, how much light reaches the ground, the arc of the trees over the path, all shift over the course of three miles.

This particular day, I ditched the audiobook and decided to make an active effort to pay attention to the landscape. My ears were open to the world. Bold — I know. For about thirty minutes, I was able to silence my thoughts and pay attention to how the dew on the grass sparkled in the sun, how neighboring trees had grown away from each other over the years, and how blue herons dipped their beaks beneath the surface of the river. When a thought appeared, I would notice it, sit with it, and let it go. Refusing to give my mind horsepower forced my thoughts to dissolve.

After a while, I could feel my mind searching for an idea to cling to — like a needy child whining in the backseat. Slowly, my thoughts began stringing themselves into chains — too long to keep track, with too much momentum to be reined in. It began to feel like battle, when the entire purpose is to stop struggling against the onrush. All at once, the canopy grew ordinary, the leaves underfoot dulled, and the undergrowth resolved into spiny brown knots of twigs. 

Noticing this, I wondered whether the trail wasn’t beautiful enough to keep my attention for longer. I chastised myself for demanding sustained interest from my surroundings. Was I so unsophisticated? If life on earth emerged from stardust, if its diverse topographies took shape through processes indifferent to intention, then beauty could not have been the point. All was created equal, and all was created exactly right. I am myself a product of this same science and randomness, but I am bound to experience it all through a human mind. Half a mile I spent in this gloom. 

I like to do things the right way, and this includes my own thinking. I do not fear thinking, I fear unchecked inference. A single untested premise can generate chains of implications that quietly alter my sense of truth. Entering a thought is like diving into deep water: depth is not the danger, so long as I remain oriented toward the surface. But when attention dissolves and the chain of implications runs on its own, I lose my sense of direction. If I stay underwater too long, coherence thins, agency sinks, and the thought I entered begins to redraw the boundaries of reality.

It is this sense of responsibility that drew me to contemplative practice in the first place. But that day, the paradox asserted itself. I took my confusion as evidence of insufficient rigor, and attention stopped being something I inhabited and became something I audited. Once framed as a problem, it demanded work.

I rounded the corner by the playground — one mile left to figure this out. I have long believed, based on fleeting experiences and the traditions I’ve studied, that sustained attention brushes up against something sacred. But I wondered whether I had misunderstood the mechanism. Maybe attention depends on beauty. The idea carried a cost: it required belief in a deeper order, one in which beauty was not incidental but fundamental.

I tried the idea on as I walked. If there were anywhere truly carved by the gods as the exemplar of beauty, it would be the Grand Canyon. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine standing in front of it, then pulled up a photograph. I held my phone sideways and stared. It was undeniably beautiful — but what would happen once I had absorbed every texture, every color, every curve of rock? Would attention settle there, or would it begin to circle, rehearsing what it had already seen? I didn’t think it would sustain my attention.

I thought about the sameness of the forest around me—the growing dimness of the sky washing it in green and brown. If it isn’t beauty, maybe it’s novelty. Perhaps attention is sustained by the promise of discovery: something new around the corner to notice and appreciate. I thought of Saint Peter’s Basilica, more than fifteen thousand square meters of sculpture, gold reliquaries, and altarpieces — High Renaissance excess at its most perfected. I could think of nowhere else with so much to meditate upon, and nowhere so maximally dense. 

This lead seemed promising, but something was off. The basilica is man-made. It was certainly created with divinity in mind, and perhaps a Catholic would tell me that to be made for God is no different than to be made by God. I’m not equipped to argue theology — nor do I know what the Bible says about interior design — but the basilica began to feel like the wrong example. Its beauty is more akin to theater: rewards are carefully placed for maximum spiritual and symbolic effect. Its design is meant to hold the eye, to give something back to the attention that lingers there.

A slowly changing landscape felt closer to what I was after. I thought back to backpacking through southern Colorado, where dense forests of aspen give way to flat green plains, the horizon edged with mountains. Nothing there demands to be admired; the change unfolds dramatically whether or not you are watching. 

And yet even this gave me pause. A hunger for novelty, even in nature, can begin to resemble something else — the same restless scanning, the same hope that the next scene will reward the looking. Doom-scrolling, just with better scenery. Perhaps I was thinking about it all wrong. Why did I need the world to give something back to my attention? What if attention was not a transaction at all? What if I simply gave it? 

As I grappled with this, a quote from The Name of the Rose came to me. Eco’s monastic detective William of Baskerville says to his novice: “The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.” 

I walked on as the sky darkened to purple. I turned and ambled up the small hill to look down at the river below, wondering whether I could ever throw the ladder away.