ON: Paying Attention

What we look at, and how we see it

Song of the Week: “Stubborn Love,” by The Lumineers - “The opposite of love’s indifference”

In Greta Gerwig’s 2017 film Lady Bird (possibly my favorite coming-of-age movie of all time), the protagonist, Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, is obsessed with leaving her hometown of Sacramento. She wants to go somewhere “where culture is, like New York, or Connecticut, or New Hampshire,” and she hopes that applying to East Coast universities will be her ticket out of California.

During the university application process, the principal of Lady Bird’s Catholic high school, Sister Sarah-Joan, reads her college essay, where she talks about her hometown. “You clearly love Sacramento,” Sister Sarah-Joan says.

“I do?” Lady Bird replies, skeptical.

“You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.”

“I was just describing it,” she demurs.  

“It comes across as love,” the older woman replies. 

“Sure,” Lady Bird says. She is dismissive. Then – “I guess I pay attention.”

Sister Sarah-Joan pauses. “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing?” she asks gently. “Love, and attention?”

It has been almost seven years since I first saw Lady Bird, and I cannot stop thinking about that scene. It is, as they say on TikTok, “My Roman Empire”: something that I think about almost every day. 

What would it mean if this claim was true? Surely not that everything we give our prolonged attention (war, inflation, annoying co-workers) is something we love - but rather, that if we truly love something or someone we will pay attention to it. We will see it in detail, and imagine it complexly, and give it our time.

Looking at Birds

There’s a 1990 experiment conceived of by John Gottman, a psychologist who has spent his career studying marriage. Researchers invited 130 couples to a lab on the University of Washington campus that had been decorated like a bed-and-breakfast, and observed them as they spent the day there. As Emily Esfashani Smith describes in a 2014 article for The Atlantic:

Throughout the day, partners would make requests for connection, what Gottman calls ‘bids.’ For example, say that the husband is a bird enthusiast and notes a goldfinch fly across the yard. He might say to his wife, ‘Look at that beautiful bird outside!’ He’s not just commenting on the bird here: He’s requesting a response from his wife - a sign of interest or support - hoping they’ll connect, however momentarily, over the bird. 

The wife now has a choice. She can respond by either ‘turning toward’ or ‘turning away’ from her husband, as Gottman puts it. Though the bird-bid might seem minor and silly, it can actually reveal a lot about the health of the relationship. The husband thought the bird was important enough to bring it up in conversation and the question is whether his wife recognizes and respects that.

Six years after the experiment, Gottman’s team followed up with the couples to find out who had remained married and who had gotten divorced. The divorced couples, they discovered, had only turned toward each other 33 percent of the time. By contrast, the couples who had stayed married turned towards each other 87 percent of the time. 

The Third Thing

I don’t know if the poet Donald Hall ever encountered Gottman’s research, but it rings true with Hall’s description of his twenty-three year marriage to fellow poet Jane Kenyon, which was cut short when she died of leukemia in 1995 at the age of 47. In a 2004 essay for Poetry, “The Third Thing,” he describes the principle at the core of their happy and enormously productive partnership. 

We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.

Though Hall speaks about marriage, the principle, of course, can be applied to all kinds of relationships. No doubt you just thought of several examples from your own life. For my husband Taylor and I, our third thing is often our cat, Minnie, and the various TV shows we watch and analyze together. For my best friend Jillian, ever since we met in the eighth grade, our third thing has been The Lord of the Rings. And in my relationships with many, many people, our third thing is books.

One-inch Picture Frames

How, then, do we learn to pay attention well, to our third things or otherwise? To see the world, and love it, and through seeing it better love the people who are close to us? In her classic instruction manual for writers, Bird for Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (1994), Anne Lamott instructs us to try viewing the world through a “one-inch picture frame.” When trying to write about a scene or an idea, she says, “I remember to pick up the one-inch picture frame and to figure out a one-inch piece of my story to tell, one small scene, one memory, one exchange” (18).  

One of my favorite examples of someone cultivating this attentiveness, this one-inch picture frame mindset, is the poet Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights (2019). Gay sets out, starting on his birthday, to notice and write about a different “delight” in his life every day for a year, from the trivial (kombucha, ambiguous signage) to the profound (babies, collective action). 

“It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar,” he reflects. “Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study. A month or two into this project delights were calling to me: Write about me! Write about me!” By the end of the project, he says, “I felt my life to be more full of delights. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight.” And, he concludes, “I also learned this year that my delight grows - much like love and joy - when I share it” (xii).

Something Worth Looking At

Last weekend, while visiting our dear friends Livvy and Ivan in Denver, I remarked on how much I appreciated the thought they put into every aspect of their lives. They imbue everything they do with intentionality and care, whether they’re hosting guests or decorating their home or creating art. “If paying attention is a kind of love,” I said to them, “then the other half of that is creating or curating things worth paying attention to.” 

Syllabus grew out of our conversations that weekend. What might it look like to apply that intentionality, that curation, to my own interests? To reject the algorithms and short attention spans and hot takes of social media, and look through a one-inch picture frame at the world for a while with sustained attention? 

I hope that you and I will find some third things here, together.

When it comes to paying attention, what else do you think I should add to my syllabus?

I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly. Note: Due to a misunderstanding of the Substack system, I put the wrong email address on my Welcome email. Please send all emails to roschmansyllabus@substack.com, and if you tried to send me an email after receiving my Welcome email, please resend it to that address!