Polyrhythmic attention & endless notifications
Cultivating virtuosity in the never-ending field of presence
photo by Mauro Romero
The question of our attention increasingly needs our attention. It’s a question of survival, but also revival, a pathway towards thriving and living in love.
How we wield (and shield) our attention starts with basic building blocks that we require for basic well-being. Further riches may be harvested when we consciously play with these elements, sometimes like a scientist and sometimes like an artist.
Such play opens the road to a joyful lifelong inquiry, that flowers as an increasing capacity to maintaining contact with our agency - at all times and in all circumstances.
This is especially true when we find ourselves navigating situations where 17 separate streams of energy compete to claim our attention simultaneously. Developing fluency with the grammar of attention eventually makes it possible to alchemize the ‘17’ into a single ‘seventeen-ness’ that is less jarring to nervous system, psyche and soul.
From there, it can be raised to an art form.
For example:
The masterful jazz drummer in a 17-piece ensemble uses polyrhythmic attention to actively hold and bounce between myriad temporalities with a single purpose.
Digging through 17 layers of soil, the mystic archeologist dissolves history into 17 layers of the present moment’s foundation, seeing the future etched in the sky.
A freestyle rapper holds 17 ideas in mind, a rotating orb of sounds, shapes and lines that rhyme in real time, nimbly moving forward and back over the beat.
A mother and father sit in a busy restaurant with their children in meltdown, negotiating how to sell their house and save their marriage, each with 17 potential consequences tugging on their sleeves.
And then there is you and the 17 notifications on your buzzing smart phone.
How does your mind move with the groove of what sits in the palm of your hand?
Life is always rhythmic, melodic, harmonic.
Infinity is expressed in cycles, sequences and layers.
What we can touch, taste, see, hear and feel is always infinitely smaller
than what we can wonder about but never know.
This is the playground where we train our attention.
Here are some basic building blocks from which lego towers, high rises and - eventually - rockets to the moon might be constructed:
The span of attention
My attention has a life span.
Even when I consciously sustain my gaze, I inevitably tire.
The spine of connection between what I behold and I eventually slumps, redirecting my attention along some new trajectory.
This is not a failure.
It’s a pattern which I observe by somehow gazing from another perch. With practice, I learn to gaze upon my gaze.
As I cultivate the intimacy of seeing myself from the outside in, I eventually recognize that my wandering can become a natural cue that reminds me to return home again.
Furthermore, when my attention is exhausted, I learn to kindly offer myself rest.
The scope of attention
My attention has boundaries where it gently touches that which I don’t quite notice.
It has a center, which sits at the foreground of my awareness - though sometimes I may consciously choose to scan its periphery.
It has volume that varies with my alertness and mood, sometimes more or less capable of holding all of what’s here.
It has depth and scope which are not only measured spatially, but by the vibrance of my curiosity, my willingness to accept reality’s never-ending transformation.
The flavor of my curiosity is something like a question. Without moving my eyes or ears, I will see and hear differently if what I ask about changes.
Most of the time, by default, the shape, size and color of my attention “is what it is.”
Yet, like my gaze or my breath, I may consciously choose to narrow or widen my focus or adjust the filter settings of what I deem to be important.
Attentional identity
At times my attention ceases to be “mine.”
Its span and its scope all but disappear completely as I fall into dancing with the Musicality of Being, the wholeness of everything that is always in order.
I might be entranced for hours by waves at the seashore or the never ending movements of humanity through the center of a metropolis.
Words like “inside,” “outside,” “focused,” and “unfocused” gradually lose their meaning, until I don’t perceive any words at all.
In this place my being enters into dialogue with wordless wisdom, which knows how to say 17 different things all at once.
So long as I inhabit this body, attention seems to teach me that
there is no such thing as silence and no such thing as stillness,
only quieter and quieter sounds, slower and smaller movements.
There is only eternal music and a never ending dance.
What I call ‘silence’ and ‘stillness’ are merely demarcations I place between
the moments in temporality when I am connected to eternity
vs. the moments when I am notthe moments when I believe that who I am is this body
vs. the moments when I do not.
When I find myself trying to multiply 17 by 17
(even as each seventeen-ness transforms itself moment-by-moment)
I might ask myself:
Should I try to differentiate, digest, feel, prioritize,
analyze, conceptualize, decide and move -
and do that again and again and again?
Or should I place my trust
in the wisdom of something larger than
my small body and brief time on this Earth?
What looks like chaos is always order from another perspective. The more I know how to zoom in and out, the less likely I am to be overwhelmed by Everything.
My nervous system, psyche and soul each seek a sense of stable ground below their feet so that I can know that it’s safe to play.
Knowing the extreme limits of what I know, I learn to ask my attention to hold what it can hold - but nothing more. I allow the rest to be held by the One that created me.
These skills of attention are married to intention.
I need not only skill to be here now - I also need my will to deliberately decide:
I will turn towards these things rather than turning away.
What disturbs me is precisely what isn’t here now,
what draws my attention from vision to memory,
from decision to vagary,
the too-much-ness of this moment
or my preference for my story over the real.
As I build my skills of attention, my will to stay present is strengthened by my trust that I don’t have to hold all of this by myself, that I can simply allow my vessel to resonate as one voice among many, that eternity will never abandon me as long as I live.
The Courageous Connection workshop is an interactive playground for your attention, where skill and will become partners to support you in presence whether life sounds like 17 sorrows or infinite joy.
Explore guided meditation, somatics and dialogue with kindred spirits who believe that our humanity depends on us remaining the authors of our own attention.
Join in on Tuesday, March 3 at 1pm EST or Wednesday March 4 at 7:30pm EST.