If You Can Do One Thing Today, Pay Attention

I was coming back from a trip when I saw a TED Talk with Joseph Gordon-Hewitt. The content of the talk was unexpected, but not unlike him. I used to follow him on social media, and I remember liking his social experiments. He didn’t seem interested in showing off his privileged life for eye candy like the other celebrities: the unofficial royals in the scheme of the world as we know it.

Joseph would ask fascinating questions to his audience. I was intrigued by it, but not enough to look through it. Now that I’m not on social media anymore (and never will be again), I have a little bit of FOMO, but if I wanted to, I could find it.

When I saw the post promoting his talk, I immediately clicked to see it. Someone like him makes sense for the public eye in a very different way. He’s darn cute, for starters. Not my type, but adorable nevertheless. He’s approachable. I feel he’s a good person. He could either have a great publicist, or he could be like that for real. My gut tells me it’s the latter. And after the talk, I believe I got confirmation of it.

The main topic of his talk was creativity, but the underlying subject was human connection.

His premise was along the lines of this:
If you’re trying to get attention, you stop being creative.
However, if you’re paying attention, it’s the total opposite.

One example he highlighted was when he was filming a scene with fellow actors. He felt distracted when he would try to compete with them (in his mind) and get the attention he craved at the moment. But when he focused on himself and paid attention to others, he could concentrate, and his acting performance would be better.

Creativity is so vibrant. There have been moments in my life that I fully embrace, and I feel I have a purpose at last. Other times, I forget how I felt, and I go back to the ego trying to feed off of anything it can, and I start craving all this external validation that never gets me what I need.

A few weeks ago, I was reading Pema Chödrön’s Welcoming the Unwelcome, and she highlighted something similar to Joseph Gordon-Hewitt, but coming from a different angle:

Another practice in this area, which I used to experiment with frequently, is to pay special attention to strangers you encounter in daily life. One of the first times I tried this was with a bank teller. While she did her calculations, I made a point of seeing her as a living human being.

When we make an effort to notice people and use our imagination in this way, we begin to feel our sameness with everyone. All of us are the center of our own universe, and at the same time, we are anonymous people that others don’t even see.

I cannot even begin to describe what I felt when I read that. That sameness with everyone, that connection, was what I had been craving all my life. I still crave it when I focus on getting attention rather than giving it.

Several spiritual teachers have referenced this premise in different ways. They use different terminology to convey the same message, but the message is the same.

There’s a prayer that embodies this essence—the prayer of St. Francis:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace:
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
to be consoled as to console,
to be understood as to understand,
to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
Amen.

When I focus on understanding rather than being understood, my true self feels better. When I do the opposite, the ego feeds, albeit never being happy for once.

Life is an endless dance between the ego and our true selves. In my spiritual path, I’ve come to understand how elusive but crucial it is to feel right-sized. It turns out that if I aim to pay attention rather than seek attention, I’m already on my way to squash the ego, at least for a little bit.

If this resonates with you, I hope you can give yourself the chance to be one with the fiber of life. We’ll be waiting for you.

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Nah is an author bringing on The Incognito Revolution to the digital sphere. If you’d like to know more about this, let her know in the comments, follow her and read her stories.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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