The Frozen Crow
Your Attention Is Not a Commodity
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
—Mary Oliver, “Sometimes”
My father and I were on a cross-country drive from Nashville to Los Angeles when we took a half-day sidetrack through Painted Desert and Petrified Forest, which are Diné and Apache lands. It’s stark, gorgeous and windy.
Our heads were stuffed full of things — facts and questions about the park, some worry over the amount of gas in the tank, my father’s incipient sinus infection, my anxiety over insurance from a car wreck, and also a new job I’d be starting in a matter of days.
At one of our stops, we got out of the truck and the wind hit us hard and sideways. It cut straight across the desert that was stretched out before us, filling our ears with an oceanic roar and exacerbating dad’s new earache.
Beside us, also looking out at the desert below, hovered a huge crow. The wind blew so hard that the crow simply hung in the air at eye level. It was big. Bigger than I would have thought crows were up close. One intelligent eye watched us as the black bird hung frozen there, basking in the billowing air currents.
We froze too, my father and I. That moment is crystallized for me, and not just because I managed to lift my camera and snap a photo. It was a moment of perfect focus. The universe seemed to converge at that one point. That crow erased all the other things vying for my attention. I can’t even remember where we were in the park. Just that crow and that windy, perfect moment.
The crow, Petrified Forest, 2014. Photo by me
Modern life was already an attention vampire before 2020. Now, there are so many things clamoring for our attention that I’m surprised some days I remember to eat. And they’re important things. It’s necessary that we direct attention and energy to a hornet’s nest of local, national and global crises.
And as humans, there are simple needs that require our attention. Work, family, friends, health, self-care.
Trying to focus attention on creating art in this moment can feel like searching for a lost hiker in an endless forest. From a helicopter. At night. Our attention is a searchlight that scans and scans a seemingly endless expanse of distractions, hunting down one speck of focus.
Everyone wants your attention, especially advertisers, politicians and anyone who stands to make a buck off you. But your attention isn’t a commodity. It’s power.
To take control of your own attention is to assert your power. Wresting it away from the doomscroll, from Netlix and Instagram, from compulsive internet shopping (that can’t only be me, right?), and placing it upon the act of creation is a revolutionary act. It is a conscious rejection of consumption.
Inspiring sentiment. Meanwhile, the part of the country that isn’t on fire is under water. How do we assert our power of attention when there’s so much work to be done?
To take control of your own attention is to assert your power. It is a conscious rejection of consumption.
Silence the Devices
Turn that sh!t off. For real.
It takes an average of 25 minutes to recover your focus after an interruption. That includes someone popping in with a “quick question,” but it also includes responding to a text or notification. Anything that pulls your attention off your task.
Addiction has plagued much of my adult life, and I can tell you with complete certainty that I am addicted to Instagram. It’s my digital drug of choice. It delivers just enough little shots of dopamine to keep me scrolling and scrolling. I lose hours in it. I’m immune to the seductive pull of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and the rest. Instagram is where my sweaty little thumb’s loyalty lies.
I had trouble sleeping recently and realized that as I lay half-conscious, the image of my phone screen scrolling through Instagram played in my mind. Between Instagram and the news, I can lose days of creative potential.
Turn off notifications, put the phone in a drawer, turn off WiFi on the computer… whatever it takes to quiet the noise in your head and make space for focus. And keep it off while you work.
The world will go on without you for a couple of hours.
Calm Your Mind
Silencing the noise outside doesn’t necessarily silence the noise inside.
In The Attention Revolution, B. Allen Wallace writes,
“Like a wild elephant, the untamed mind can inflict enormous damage on ourselves and those around us. In addition to oscillating between an attention deficit (when we’re passive) and hyperactivity (when we’re active), the normal, untrained mind compulsively disgorges a toxic stream of wandering thoughts, then latches on to them obsessively, carried away by one story after another.”
It’s not about having a zen-like, blissed out headspace and environment to work in.
Different artists and different art require different kinds of focus. But everyone does need some kind of focus. The focused mind is relaxed. It is calm, but alert. It contains a quiet core amid the sound, force or chaos needed to make the work. Any chaos that comes is intentional. It is created and directed by you, not an outside force vying for your attention.
We all experience occasional perfect moments of flow, but the labor of art is as much habit as it is inspiration. We can’t wait for flow to come to us. We have to put in the work. To reach that focus, we have to have control of our minds. In our article on rituals, we talked about the value of routine in creating and reinforcing focus.
Over the years, my creative routine has been dictated by that of my life and work. Often that meant writing on lunch breaks. Where I once needed complete silence and a good bit of time to calm my mind, I then had to write in cafes, restaurants and my car. And I needed to focus immediately.
That’s where my habit of listening to the same piece of music when I sit down to write came to benefit me. Over time, my body and mind synced with my ears. I automatically associated that music with the creative state, and now I can drop to better depths more quickly.
However we do it, we have to silence our inner noise. And especially…
Shut Up Your Inner Critic
Mine has been working overtime this year.
Everytime I put pen to paper (rather, finger to keyboard), he pipes up.“Ooh! Is that cultural appropriation? That’s definitely racist somehow. Why are you even writing this? You don’t have an MFA. All the writers have MFAs. I think that was a Don Delillo novel already. Nobody even reads this kind of poetry anymore. It’s never going to be published. The critics will dismember you. Did I mention you’re going to die alone?”
He’s an asshole.
But, if I’m not wary, what do I end up doing? Delete, delete, delete.
“Inner critic” can be another name for self-sabotage. This voice, this psychological mechanism, is built to stop you before you even begin. It’s designed to hamstring you. Why?
Well, the world is full of unkind people who like to attack the work of others. And we live in a world of noise and snark and venom. But I believe the impetus of the inner critic urge comes from our deepest sense of self.
Jules Shuzen Harris clarified this for me in his book, Zen Beyond Mindfulness. In it, Harris (a psychotherapist and zen teacher), explains the Identity-System psychological theory. He says,
“Our Identity-System is the system that creates our sense of self. It insists that we are damaged and that undoing that damage is the key and only way of peace of mind. Out of this sense of damage, we create stories to explain why we are damaged.”
He goes on to say that these stories result in “mind clutter and body tension, and, most importantly … reinforce the false belief that the self is damaged.”
If we can accept that we are not intrinsically damaged, that there is nothing wrong with us and that our voice is as valid and important as anyone else’s, then we can begin pushing past the inner critic.
I’m not saying the inner critic doesn’t have value. After all, total lack of an inner critic is probably a sign of rampant narcissism. But to get that first draft done, that sketch or concept or scene out there, you have to shut that thing up.
Give Your Work the Gift of Your Presence
We’ve all worked when we’re distracted or annoyed, rushed or resentful of the time. We’re human and we don’t live in a perfect art vacuum.
The focused, direct attention and affection of parents to children has been shown to increase a child’s production of oxytocin, lead to less anxiety and help those children become happier, healthier adults.
A relationships benefit from focused attention, listening with compassion, and from intentional presence.
Why not give this same attention to our work? After all, we create because we love to. We love what we make. Let it benefit from uninterrupted focus, time and presence. And no, I’m not anthropomorphising your work here. Rather, the focus you must devote to give that kind of presence can only make your work better and enhance your own experience of the act of making it.
And, to come full circle, the modern world needs more kindness and authenticity, it needs to be quicker to think and slower to react. If we can be present for our work, then we can be present for our loved ones. We can model presence, and that presence can spread. Little by little, person by person.
If every molecule of our attention is fought over by international corporations, attention-starved politicians, internet trolls, and advertisers from Amazon to Zulily, then that attention must have value.
Own it. Use it. Assert your power.
