I woke up from a nap and when I went out in the world I found that everything had changed. Except me, or so I thought. Unlike Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, I had not changed into a cockroach. Unlike the weatherman Phil Connors in the movie Groundhog Day, I was not stuck in a time loop in which I awoke to find that I was living through the past day over and over.
Instead, I was like Rip Van Winkle from Washington Irving’s 1820 story in which a rascal and dawdler drinks a potion from a large flagon offered him by forest spirits. He falls asleep in a hollow among the “fairie mountains” — the Catskills. When he wakes up, everything has changed:
A troop of strange children ran at his heels, hooting after him, and pointing at his gray beard. The dogs, too, not one of which he recognized for an old acquaintance, barked at him as he passed. The very village was altered: it was larger and more populous. There were rows of houses which he had never seen before, and those which had been his familiar haunts had disappeared. Strange names were over the doors—strange faces at the windows—everything was strange. His mind now misgave him; he began to doubt whether both he and the world around him were not bewitched.
I’ve felt the bewitchment, and I bet you have, too. A familiar house down the street is here one moment and gone the next, spirited away in the night to make way for something new. Perhaps we notice that a favorite tree in the neighborhood park has died. It wasn’t that long ago that its branches, thick with leaves, gave us shade after an afternoon walk. The thing is, changes like these are happening right before our eyes over days, weeks, months, and years. We just don’t notice.
JM Barrie, author of Peter Pan, wrote a play called Mary Rose in which the title character has an experience much like Rip Van Winkle’s. She vanishes while on an outing with her father to a mysterious little island called, “The Island that Likes to be Visited.” Twenty-one days later, she’s found, although she has no memory of being gone. It happens to her again years later, and this time she’s gone for 25 years. Again, when found, Mary hasn’t aged and has no real memory of where she’s been. The play is eerie and unsettling. Alfred Hitchcock tried and failed to turn it into a movie starring Tippi Hedren.
Both tales are provocative and both have generated plenty of analyses. I want to focus on a simple interpretation. For entirely different reasons in entirely different circumstances, both Rip and Mary are less than attentive to the world around them. Rip is self-absorbed; Mary is an innocent girl born to overly protective parents. “She is just a rare and lovely flower, less fitted than those others for the tragic role,” Barrie writes. It’s easy to see both stories as cautionary tales. A lack of attention could lead us to miss unexpected changes in our world, including changes that endanger us.
The climate crisis is an example. We went to sleep, and when we awakened the world was a hotter place, ice caps were melting and species were disappearing at an unprecedented rate. Like Rip, though, we look at ourselves and wonder how the world could have changed while we haven’t. Of course, we’ve changed, too, but we are often as inattentive to this as we are to the world around us.
The ubiquity of virtual experience — TV, social media etc. — can fool us into thinking that we are the most attentive people of all time. Media are pretty good at telling us what they are paying attention to, but not always so good at telling us what we should be paying attention to. At a point that comes earlier to us than we think, we become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information that comes at us. It’s like a bright light in the eyes that blinds us.
Despite a life in journalism and politics, my own attention to the world is often challenged, and I’m looking for ways to improve. It occurred to me that if I want to be more attentive to the world, I ought to get out in it more than I do. I’m deeply skeptical of most self-improvement projects, largely because their boosters promise the moon to the earthbound. There’s a clue. How about some help in my earth-boundedness?
For instance, do I even know where I am? I read some advice that several times a day I should point to the north, orienting my self on the globe. Taking out my compass, I found our street is perfectly aligned on the north-south axis. This is not a profound discovery, but you might be surprised about how such a little thing as that can make you feel more connected to the world.
I then came across a book called, The Natural History of Texas, by Brian R. Chapman and Eric G. Bolen (with a forward by my friend Andrew Sansom). Beautifully written and illustrated, the book details the biology of ten separate “ecoregions” of Texas. Here’s a map:
I’ve spent considerable time in six of these regions, the Gulf Prairies, Blackland Prairies, Piney Woods, South Texas Plains, Edwards Plateau, and the Trans-Pecos Mountains. But, what did I really know about the places I’d spent my life in? Not much, I discovered while devouring the book. I didn’t test myself on the new knowledge, though. The point is the process, to simply become more engaged in the world around me.
A funny thing happened as I tried these and other simple ways of improving my attention to the world: the world no long felt separate from me. I was less subject and the world was less object. The trees, streets, houses and folks around me began to shimmer. Paying attention, I understood that the climate crisis, in fact all our earthly crises, are not only happening out there. They are happening in here (points to heart) and they require my attention.
I'm reminded of the following from a John Lennon song titled, Beautiful Boy.
"Life is what happens to you
While you're busy making other plans"
May our days be filled with meaningful attention and not with pointless distraction.