My Attention is a Moral Act

Perhaps you remember the scene from 2017’s Lady Bird. Our eponymous character is in the office of her Catholic school principal and teacher, Sister Joan, talking about her writing:

Sister Joan: “You clearly love Sacramento.”

Lady Bird: “I do?”

Sister Joan: “You write about Sacramento so affectionately and with such care.”

Lady Bird: “Well, I was just describing it.”

Sister Joan: “Well, it comes across as love.”

Lady Bird: “Sure, I guess I pay attention.”

Sister Joan: “Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing? Love and attention?”

Love and attention.

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For my day job I’m an English professor at a community college, and about once every year I get the opportunity to teach a Poetry Writing Seminar. As part of our journey into the nuts and bolts of writing verse, we read and discuss Mary Oliver’s classic text A Poetry Handbook.

These are freshmen community college students, so I’m not really expecting deeply skilled mature writing or profound insights. I’m just trying to help them lay a foundation. But every once in awhile a student drops a thought that stops me in my tracks.

Last week we were discussing imagery in poetry and a student noted Mary Oliver’s emphasis on attention. The student wrote, “[Oliver] treats paying close, careful attention to the natural world as almost a moral act, not just noticing things but being fully present with them.”

These are the kind of moments as a teacher that make my soul sing, when a student “gets it”, but they also offer a perspective that teaches you something.

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“Attention is the beginning of devotion” - "Upstream”, Mary Oliver

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I know I’ve been circling around attention for many years. I’ve got a bit of a contemplative streak. I love the writing of Mary Oliver, from which this student drew inspiration. I myself have been a poet going on twenty years, developing my own practices of attention. One of my most meaningful habits is taking walks in nature, where I try to notice the small stories and details happening around me. So, yes, I know the value of attention. But somehow the idea of attention being a moral act had never struck me in quite that way. Until now.

Not coincidentally, for the past month or so I’ve taken social media off my phone for Lent, because, you know, Lent is when you give up stuff. But more than that, I have been struggling for years, as I’m guessing many of us have, with my relationship to social media. I’ve at least whittled down my social media presence to Instagram and here on Substack. I’ve set focus times and app limits on my phone that have helped me somewhat curtail the time I spend on these apps. But it still hasn’t felt like enough. I’ve still found myself wasting time on my Explore page feeding on whatever diet the algorithm has cooked up for me.

We all know the data and evidence on social media consumption at this point. We’ve watched The Social Dilemma. We’ve read Jonathan Haidt’s work. We know that social media algorithms are the bait and we are the fish, and that our attention is being bought and sold by big tech companies, companies that are well aware of all the ways that social media is negatively impacting society and don’t care because they are raking in billions.

But more than that, I think I have truly begun to understand and grapple with the reality that social media and the general media consumption ecosystem is malforming us and has malformed me. I think again of the hours I have spent consuming the algorithm stream. I think of the money I’ve spent on products that were fed to me via advertisements. And beyond that, I think of every time I pick up my phone when I’m bored in a work meeting, or at church, or at home, or at a party or God forbid in a conversation with my wife or a friend. That action devalues the real human experience I’m having in that moment.

The tricky thing is, there are people in my life I wouldn’t know and be in relationship with if not for social media (my wife for one). I’ve gained some wonderful friendships and connections through social media that I wouldn’t trade for the world. Without social media I wouldn’t really have a place to share my own work and writing. So it seems possible that social media is not entirely malforming or negative.

So I guess I’m trying to figure out how and in what ways social media can be life giving and promote flourishing in my relationships, and in what ways I can try to resist its malformative tendencies. Perhaps that’s a losing battle, and thirty years from now we’ll look back and be like what the hell were we thinking. I admire Wendell Berry and his commitment to not even own a computer, but I’m not ready to give up mine or my smartphone, and maybe that makes me a weaker person. So be it, Wendell Berry can be better than me.

For now at least, I’m grateful for the perspective this last month has been providing me, and for this insight from my student on the moral value of attention. If I could bring it back to Sister Joan for a second, if my attention is love, I want to love humans above all, and not streams of mindless code whiling away my hours.