Attention is a Moral Practice

“To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” — Mary Oliver

We live in the Attention War age.

Our culture is dominated by a fierce competition among big tech companies, advertisers and content creators to capture and monetize human attention. But attention is not something we give away without consequences, it is a moral practice. And the stakes are high.

Our attention shapes who we become, how we understand others and whether our communities flourish or fracture. At a time when division, outrage and distraction compete relentlessly for our notice, the cultivation of attention may be among the most important forms of civic and personal renewal available to us.

In Johannes Vermeer’s 17th-century painting, "Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window," a young woman stands alone in a room, absorbed in a letter. Sunlight enters through an open window and falls gently on her face and hands. Nothing dramatic happens; there is no visible action, no spectacle. Yet the painting holds our gaze. It pulls us into a moment of deep focus, both our own and that of the subject. This is what attention looks and feels like. The window along with the girl's subtle reflection suggest a world beyond the room, and that our inner lives are linked to realities outside ourselves.

Contemporary neuroscience research shows that how we use our attention shapes our perception. What we repeatedly attend to alters our understanding of reality. We become increasingly aware of whatever we consistently notice and increasingly blind to whatever we ignore.

In practical terms, this means that societies become what they attend to, and if we want to change society we have to reclaim our attention as a moral practice of individual and collective agency.

A culture focused primarily on fear becomes fearful, one focused on enemies becomes hostile, and one focused on status becomes competitive. The reverse is also true. A society that learns to notice acts of care, examples of cooperation and the humanity of others develops greater capacities for trust and solidarity.

American poet Mary Oliver's poem, "Yes! No!," is a virtuoso act of recognizing others. The narrator walks among the natural world giving notice to all the individual subjects in her path. She calls out the experiences of the swan, the violets and water thrushes, giving them standing equal to her own.

The poem claims every day as an opportunity to notice what we previously overlooked. Every person contains depths we have not yet perceived; and every community contains stories we have not yet heard.

“To pay attention,” the narrator enjoins us in the poem's final line, “this is our endless and proper work.”

1. Mary Oliver, “Yes! No!,” in "Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver"(New York: Penguin Press, 2017). First published in "White Pine: Poems and Prose Poems" (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994).
2. Johannes Vermeer, "Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window," (1657-59). Gemäldegalerie, Dresden.