Attention as Adventure

One definition of a story: it’s a series of moments of attention.

I worry that I’m losing the game. I took a wrong turn somewhere along the way. I’m not sure how to get back.

I had a conversation with a writer friend recently. We were walking over to a class at the California College for the Arts where I was going to speak to writing students, and I got a flash of a memory of when I was a young writer in San Francisco. I remembered how I’d spend my days traipsing through the Mission, reading and writing in cafes, watching people, dreaming, aspiring, wondering.

I told my friend how much I missed that era of being a writer, how I preferred it to my life as a writer now, even though I’m supposedly more accomplished. The world held so much wonder then. I could go into a bookstore and be transformed into a different person by the time I left. Each day pulsed with a possible adventure, the joy of a new thought.

I can still traipse through those same streets, of course, but somehow it’s different. Somehow I don’t have quite the same access. Age? Maybe. But why does age and whatever jadedness it brings on have to be the culprits, I wondered.

Yesterday, I stumbled on a famous line of poetry from Mary Oliver, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” Every time I…