On Particularized Attention

A Lesson From My One-Year-Old Son

“Kids have short attention spans.” As far as I can tell from my brief time as a father, that truism seems to hold up. My one-year-old Roberto can’t sit all the way through Green Eggs and Ham (although he almost can — and he absolutely adores the book).

But when it comes to attention, is duration all that matters? I ask because kids/babies are great at something else: bringing remarkable intensity to the attention they give.

A few months ago, I sat on my balcony reading the news on my phone. I happened to glance through the glass door, and I saw my son sitting on the floor, gazing intently at his tower of colored rings. A ray of sunlight struck the topmost ring, appearing to set it ablaze, and Roberto pressed against the spot with his finger. There I sat, reading about Ukraine, about Los Angeles, about Gaza, my mind engaging methodically with the concerns of a vast humanity — while for Roberto, the whole world was there, in that curious play of painted plastic and light.

As a reader, an intellectual, an adult, I’ve grown adept at paying attention to the gestalt. But I worry I’ve lost the capacity for the focused intention on the particular, for gazing at the minute and ephemeral with wonder.

I used to have it. I remember, as a kid, how my hand would feel just a little bit different after I’d crawled on a somewhat-dirty carpet, the skin a little less slippery. I remember the armchair with that fabric (chenille?) that would change from lighter-to-darker, then darker-to-lighter as I passed my hand over it, and how I’d sit and brush my hand against the armrest again and again, and how those shades and that fabric meant something, were such an integral part of my oh-so-tangible world. I remember the dust in the air on Sunday afternoons. The clack of those plastic blue plates against the wooden coffee table. The peeling paint on the fire hydrant at Raynham-Taunton Greyhound Park. All of it, all of it, meant something.

The other month, I hiked at Spruce Knob, West Virginia’s tallest point. I carried away a picture of the place in my mind, but it was general, and overwhelmingly visual rather than tactile. Rounded mountaintops. Dappled light. Scraggly trees. But did the wind set the leaves to whispering? Were there grains of dirt trapped between my toes?

In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong writes, “To look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.” No surprise those are the words of an eminent poet. He describes the sort of attention that allows all the world’s phenomena to embed themselves fully in our psyches. (I would only expand Vuong’s focus on “looking” to include “touching,” “smelling,” “tasting,” and “hearing.”) When our minds, souls, and sense organs meet, we experience the world more acutely, more truthfully. We experience it as the amalgam of miracles that it is.

I want to be a poet. More importantly, I want to be someone who, as Mary Oliver writes, avoids “simply having visited this world.”

It’s time to renew my commitment to particularized attention. Thank God I have Roberto here to teach me.