Staring At The Back Of My Forehead

It’s easy to notice when a car collides with another. The impact and crunching of flimsy metal and hard plastic grabs you, reminds you to concentrate, and in remembering, you might grip the wheel, reassert your focus, and shake your head in judgment at the lack of attention that some people pay.

I felt that same call recently when my foot slipped on a wet cobble and I missed falling into heavy Portuguese traffic by a few inches. I caught myself but finished the thought of the near miss by imagining what the quality and sound of the bones breaking would be like had my body made contact with that bus. Would I feel the wet sticky goo of my brain as it leaked? Would my eye admire the chrome trim before it made contact with the corner of my temple? Or does the impact act as a metaphorical but also actual kill switch to sensation? Is this fear of the end or just fear of sensations that occur before it? Life has my attention now, even if I'm just imagining the slipperiness of my insides mixing with the soft rain, an informal but beautiful funeral; a return to the earth through the gutter and drain of a busy city street.

At any moment a loss of attention can forever change your life. The 4” scar that zigzags up the inside of my elbow reminds me every day that I have had my fair share of losses, loss of attention, that is. And the fear of future scars directs my gaze but in unusual and easily manipulated ways, like fear of an impending pandemic that turns my attention to how much toilet paper we have on hand. The battle for good over bad experiences in life is often determined by the margin of attention that we hold, and in some cases, what we might be left to wipe our ass with if we don’t pay attention.

Attention is the most valuable commodity in the world. Media companies fight for it, corporations trade in it, and governments try to figure out how to aim it so that they may retain their power while keeping yours as limited as is tolerable. All of these forces are allied against you, and it is infuriating, yet giving your attention to outrage is the same as giving your attention in complacency.

I think I first heard the phrase “tune your attention” during some bullshit breath workshop or maybe it was at a sound bath or drum circle. I don’t remember because the term started to change how I thought about the binary nature of attention, and so whatever prayer or seance happened after is irrelevant. Attention suddenly and unexpectedly became—to me—a malleable trait, and my hand was on the dial. While this is not a controversial idea, in practice, it goes against everything we are conditioned to believe. When times are rough and attention is required to improve our circumstances, we are overly encouraged to direct our attention towards something outside of ourselves, to escape the sensations. Dull. Numb. Distract. But living life isn't different than developing any other skill: doing it well and embracing all aspects of it — the hardest aspects included — requires attention rather than evasion. Difficulty is often the entry fee to a meaningful experience, and we have been conditioned to pay with the wrong currency.

It strikes me as odd that a common problem in society is our inability to pay attention yet the incentives for “success” are based on capturing the attention of others. How may we hone our attention enough to influence ourselves in a world that overtly rewards influencing others?

When you can’t pay attention enough to be indoctrinated by the state or inseminated by an industry, you have a medical condition, complete with acronyms. It is a deficit, a disorder, and after asking rhetorical questions, the credentialed someone seated in a counterfeit mid-century modern club chair offers an understanding nod and some potent pharmacology for $300 an hour. Surely, there's an app for it that's cheaper as well because instead of paying cash for someone else’s attention you are paying with personal information. I know adults who have trouble making it to work on time or staying focused there so management has referred them to therapists to improve their productivity. Doctors may write the prescriptions, but it's business that moves medication to the masses. This is well-accepted in our society which actively advertises amphetamines, “legal speed”, to improve commerce and productivity. A drug to help the economy is medicinal for the majority because it benefits the collective and the corporation, while the side effects are suffered by only the individual, unless someone climbs a clock tower with a prescription … and a rifle.

Society wants you to pay more attention but not too much attention because then you might notice the unfairness of the world, the “rules for thee but not for me”. Your betters try to hide the cracks of society, to prevent you noticing that the young and poor go to die for the old and rich. You must not question the narrative that eating red meat is the single biggest contributor to climate change but must turn a blind eye to cruise ships and foreign trade because globalization is not to be questioned, production is not to be inhibited. If you point out that bombing another country which doesn’t have the ability to do the same to us can’t truthfully be called “defense” your “hippie” ideals make you a danger, an enemy of democracy. You are a radical and need to mellow out. “Look, we made weed legal (kind of) so just smoke this and shut up.”

Radical you might be, just for paying attention. This could make you a good candidate for an experimental drug that will boost GDP, bolster foreign trade and erode any sense of Self that you may have had. We've been convinced that a democracy is governance “by the will of the people for the people,” but I would argue that the will of the people has been manipulated by the few FOR the few, accepted and enforced by the complacent many. I’m not trying to overthrow a government, or burn buildings down to protest injustice, I just want my attention back, and to help others get theirs back as well. We keep telling people to pay attention. And although it feels good to be awake and talk from some kind of soap box about these high principles of human nature, the truth is, we are all dealing with the same problem. We are just one distraction away from slipping in front of a bus—sometimes not just metaphorically.

I can’t count the times that I’ve been distracted while writing this piece. When a heater clicked on in another room I lost my train of thought because I wondered whether I was cold. Then I wondered if I was hungry. Then I felt guilty for not being productive enough. “What time is it? I’ve only been writing for 15 minutes, it’s no wonder I am only starting the second paragraph. OK, what was it about attention?” And then I’m back, trying to describe the nature of our conscious awareness while being unable to maintain my own.

I am reminded of one of the deep lessons I learned about my attention by listening to Richard Albert repeat a mantra. I usually quit listening after the second or third repetition because I start surfing the internet or give in to the casino-like thrill of scrolling the “socials”. But about the twentieth time that he said it a lightbulb blinked on. “I am loving awareness. Ah shit, I have a smudge on my glasses, where the hell did I put that lens cleaner? How did I even see through these things?”

It didn’t dawn on me that “loving awareness” was more than just a hippie epithet meant to heal the scars of my ancestral trauma until my awareness just did its awareness thing. I understood at once, a double meaning that I had missed for years. My brain, in its infinite quest for change added a word to the mantra and I got it: “I am loving THIS awareness.”

A siren screams past the office and instead of thinking about someone else’s day taking a turn for the worse (probably slipped on a cobble), I glance at my phone. Fuck! Only 45 minutes until I have to leave. “Why did I say that I would meet them?” Before I even notice it, I’ve checked my email — twice — and I’m scanning through an old email that I didn’t want to read earlier but now, for some reason, seems to be far more important than finishing the next paragraph.

The only way to recover attention sometimes is to take a deep breath. Do this right now; I know you can’t help but want to feel the sensation of these words. Start by blowing out — sshhhhooo — and then take a fresh breath with a slow inhale through the nose — sniiifff — and a long, accentuated exhale, push your tongue against the roof of your mouth to build back pressure until the sound coming out is like a tire leaking air — tsssssss. This is the “old way,” the style that sends those devoted to their attention up into the mountains to be alone and away from distraction. But even in a cave I think I would still spend seventeen minutes trying to find the word that describes "making a word out of a sound" as I did for an inhale through the nose. The term is "onomatopoeia", and although it doesn’t fit into this poetically, I invested my time in learning it so I’m keeping the word in here for posterity.

I inhale deeply, start the timer in my mind and instantly become aware of my posture as my expanding diaphragm informs me I’ve been slouching while staring at my phone. There is a power in a single, conscious deep breath. People have been trying to harness it for millennia. I’ve only been able to harness the power of my deep frustration as I expel an exasperated sigh at human nature—my nature. I try to hold the number of breaths until I lose focus, then start back at one. I’ve never made it past eight and I count the exhale as a separate breath. Let’s call it eight seconds, that’s my attention span — and I practice. The number reveals itself in my mind as I stare at a point in my imagination. One time, years ago, a guy—whose name I don’t remember because I wasn’t paying attention—told me where my third eye was and so I try and look into that with my mind’s eye, but I never really got the details. In reality I’m just staring at the back of my forehead and thinking that this practice could have started as a joke: two friends make a third friend close his eyes and implore him to “not think of anything.” He is sitting there, just like me, looking like an idiot.

“Focus on your breath, or count your breaths” is well known counsel, and there are apps to help. I use the counting technique, but not the apps and although I always question whether thinking of the number of breaths counts as a thought, I certainly know all of that other shit that just popped up was, so I start back at one …

The truth is I don’t always “love this awareness" because when I turn it on and I tune in, I get freaked out by what I notice. An infinite web of conversation that I didn’t ask for. I get why people stare into screens, pop pills, soothe their angst with liquor, or numb themselves with overly-palatable food. Of course food is a tool of attention manipulation — subsidized by the powerful and wielded by the desperate, it is rare that we acknowledge our lack of attention towards it. You know the food I’m talking about, the textural kind that’s flown six times around the world but is “plant based” so it’s acceptably wasteful. It’s of the sort that you can grip. The kind that has a universally known shape like a Dorito or Pringle. All these foods honoring geometry, chips shaped like triangles that have flavors shaped like other triangles. “Nacho flavored pizza bites,” are the kind of snack that you can eat in a dark room with a bright screen. You can even grip them one-handed, while your dominant hand and thumb lets people know you, “double tapped that photo”, or that the words they posted to document their third anniversary deserve a, “flexed arm + anatomical heart emoji.” Every single industrialized crisp has been shaped for pacification, homogenized, sanitized of variation so that you don’t need to think, you can just grab and watch, and chew and grunt. Made for a repeatable, predictable, known existence. Processed beyond recognition. Made as cheaply as possible, available everywhere, worth next to nothing, literally cheaper than water (not the water found at an airport, amusement park, or movie theater, of course). And at some point I realize I'm talking about the consumer...

Our attention is so sacred that whatever we focus upon becomes valuable. Viewed in this way, we are funding the world with our attention, giving value to whatever we gaze upon. Fear, hatred, and hierarchy are the slot machines of attention investment — they focus your attention externally and offer hope of a payout, but they only enrich “the house.” When you turn your attention inward and focus internally, when you notice the subtle nature and paradoxical self, you return the value, you stop spending your attention and you start saving it for what matters: you.

By appreciating awareness you increase its value; awareness is a renewable resource and you are the source of this value, which makes YOU the house that always wins. Once honed, attention puts you directly in your own experience, shielding you from external distraction, from those who would steal your focus in order to manipulate.

I used to fear competition. I was mortified by others paying me attention and the possibility of losing in front of them—read: my attention was on what another’s attention might reveal about me. “Losing,” in this regard it's simply a loss of attention. It wasn’t until I had to take the stage in front of thousands of spectators that I was forced to address the seemingly impossible task of trying to focus on MY experience. It became clear that the only way to win was to have an experience. The crowd was watching me, the judge was watching me, my competitors were watching me, the only answer was to bet big and focus on myself.

Criticism means someone else is spending their renewable resource on you, which proves the point that even “haters” are fans. Receiving this attention becomes addictive, and leads to seeking behavior. It is the architectural design of fame, social media, and the market. We are all on the trading room floor, trying to predict where the majority’s focus will be. Yelling and screaming at others about what to pay attention to while missing the point of being aware in the first place, which is to have an experience. This decides our future, YOUR future.

When you wonder what you should pay attention to, it is an infinite, multiple choice question with only one answer. So I breathe in and start back at one …