Category Archives: Attentiveness

The World Does Not Organize Itself

In February, Secretary Blinken made a “Zoom visit” to all serving in the US Foreign Service in Mexico. In the general session, his parting message was to recall that “the world does not organize itself.” The upshot is that if we do not, with wisdom and intention, attend to the justice of international relationships, entropy and/or bad actors will cause chaos in our world.

This is certainly true in the context that he means, and in other places of work, business, and ministry. And, now more than ever, it is true of our interior worlds.

If we do not, with wisdom and intention, attend to our relationships with the stuff of our lives and order it according to what is most important, a crush of inputs will fracture our attention and ability. Overcommitment will overwhelm us. The endless scroll of social media and outraged news leaves with our attention spent and no energy to reorient it.

Our interior world will not organize itself. And, if we do not order them, we cannot effectively serve the justice of our city, nation, and world.

St. Augustine’s Self-Criticism

It took me a long time to appreciate St. Augustine of Hippo, whose Confessions were assigned to us a few times through college and graduate school.

Here was a man who was clearly holy, writing with singular insight about the journey to know God, and, in the same volume, wrote a fantastic amount about how imperfect he was. This appeared to me, at first blush, to be indulgently self-critical.

But some years ago, I heard someone remark that an inescapable part of the journey to holiness is knowing that precious little separates us from truly destructive behavior and self-dilution. And the ability to see this reality clearly liberates us to approach others with deep compassion. We are not, in fact, any better than that person we may feel superior to.

I think that this is what Augustine knew, and why he wrote so much about his imperfection. He knew the particularity of his interior life, his capacity to be self-destructive, and, ultimately, the experience of amazing grace. I believe that it is this completeness of vision that undergirds his holiness and his life of erudite service.

70 Seconds

When I was home caring for our first son, our mornings were structured around an adventure outside the apartment. We would walk to the library, a museum, or a park, and then head home for lunch and a nap.

One day, I noticed that I always seemed to be rushing to and from these adventures. Rushing to catch the light before it turned red. Always trying to find the fastest way through the city to my destination.

Out of curiosity, I timed myself en route to our farthest adventure at a leisurely pace and then going as fast as I could while still walking.

The difference was 70 seconds.

70 seconds! This was what I gained for giving my attention over to rushing instead of mindful enjoyment of the journey.

I am still often guilty of speeding in this way. It is an ongoing challenge to remind myself that this rushing is not worth that which it sacrifices.

It’s Just Soup

My dad’s dad’s mom used to say this thing when someone was feeling quite wrapped up in the emotional urgency of a difficult situation.  He would remind the person that “you don’t have to drink the soup as hot as it boils.”

For a long time, I took this to mean that I just needed to give a tough situation a few minutes before throwing myself back into the mess, back into the emotional emergency. 

But the other day, my dad reminded me that, often, the situation is not worthy of the emotional emergency I place onto it.  That situation?  Hey, it’s just soup.  

Taken this way, the first seven words of my great-grandmother’s sentence also suffice as quality advice.  You don’t have to drink the soup.

I don’t take this as license to be aloof.  Rather, it is an invitation to hold my inner chatter and my emotional response to a given situation a little less tightly.  And this stance, in reality, frees me to be more thoughtful and generous, rather than obsessed with my own stress response.

So, hey, it is just soup.  And there will be more tomorrow.  

Consume accordingly. 

Fewer Lines

One morning when I was learning to program, I was given a problem and told to write an algorithm to solve it. I dutifully cobbled together a tangle of code and was approaching a workable solution.

Then, one of the instructors looked at my monitor, highlighted every line, pressed delete, and walked away.

At first, I felt panicked. (That had taken me so long to do!)

And then, I felt relieved. I was free to consider the problem in a fresh way, and solved it in a few crisp lines.

It is often difficult to embrace an invitation to step back from “the way I (or we) do things.” But when I do, I am often rewarded with the freedom that comes from simplicity.

The First Cup of Coffee

Ever read anything by Amor Towles?  If you haven’t, and do, expect a treat.  (A Gentleman in Moscow is a brilliant place to start.)

For me, it is like being in the presence of someone who is marvelously attentive, refreshingly insightful, and appreciative of great books.

I read his Rules of Civility about a year ago (so, the beginning of the COVID-times).  I have considered the following bit, from the mouth of the book’s narrator, since.

My father was never much for whining… He certainly didn’t complain about his health as it failed.

But one night near the end, as I was sitting by his bedside trying to entertain him with an anecdote about some nincompoop with whom I worked, out of the blue he shared a reflection which seemed such a non sequitur that I attributed it to delirium. Whatever setbacks he had faced in his life, he said, however daunting or dispiriting the unfolding of events, he always knew that he would make it through, as long as when he woke in the morning he was looking forward to his first cup of coffee. Only decades later would I realize that he had been giving me a piece of advice.

Uncompromising purpose and the search for eternal truth have an unquestionable sex appeal for the young and high-minded; but when a person loses the ability to take pleasure in the mundane – the cigarette on the stoop or the gingersnap in the bath – she has probably put herself in unnecessary danger. What my father was trying to tell me, as he neared the end of his own course, was that this risk should not be taken lightly: One must be prepared to fight for one’s simple pleasures and to defend them against elegance and erudition and all manner of glamorous enticements.

Order or Control

As much as I think I would like to, I am unable to control all the circumstances of my life. It is simply not possible.

Same thing with the mystery of God. Trying to control the Trinity? That is a tough road.

But what is possible is order: to orient myself toward the stuff of my life such that I am able to react masterfully, faithfully, with love. This may likely mean doing less things and/or, on a given day, doing the important things first.

Close Enough to Love

The first line of Psalm 64 leads a crucial prayer: Deliver us, O Lord, from fear of the enemy. In some translations, fear is rendered as dread.

Is this not fascinating? In life, there is plenty of wanting to escape conflict with one’s enemies (real or imaginary) but here, we pray to deliver our lives from dread of these people and conflicts.

Dorothy Day wrote that only when we are delivered from this fear can we get close enough to love. Put another way, in order to love our “enemies,” we have to first pray for the grace to see our dread and to overcome it.

I don’t think that this is something we can do of our own power.

Deliver us, O Lord, from fear of the enemy.

Furious or Curious

The experience of anger can be quite involuntary. Something happens, trespassing against our expectations of how things should be, leaving us furious.

Okay. But then what happens.

Anger can quickly turn into self-righteousness, to barricading oneself on the moral high ground. And anger can take the legs out from under our ability to listen perceptively and to relate imaginatively to people who think differently from us. And because of this, anger can handicap any attempt to accurately perceive and productively improve the situation that made us angry in the first place.

We do not always have the choice to be furious. But we can, afterwards and always, choose to be curious.

(Hey!  The above reminds me of the dear Fr. Michael Rossmann, SJ’s recent post on his new Substack blog.  Check it out!)