how do you care for your attention?
how sacred spaces, Real Things, and no-phone walks can help you have a happier, more productive writing life
Today I’m excited to share another entry in the new tending section, which is a mix of essays and interviews about creative practice that do a deeper dive into a particular craft element or process question.
Normally, this space features guest writers, but today it’s me! I’m trying out an experiment across this spring semester, where I’ll be sharing exercises and experiments designed to help you better care for your attention as a route into a happier, less frazzled writing life.
I’d love your suggestions of other writers and artists to feature in this series, so feel free to email me with ideas. You can just hit “reply” to this newsletter.
Hello there. My spring semester started yesterday, and I’m back to teaching one of my favorite classes, an interdisciplinary capstone course I designed around Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing, called Resisting the Attention economy. The course description begins like this:
The secret title of this course is “Senior Seminar in Doing Nothing.” But not just any kind of nothing: in this class, we’ll be learning about and practicing a particular kind of Nothing, one that’s modeled after Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, our primary course text.
We often think about attention in economic terms: we’re paying attention, or not. In the attention economy, apps and websites compete for “eyeballs,” treating attention as a resource that can be sought after and commodified. Is attention something we can spend? How can we cultivate habits of attention? What are you doing with your attention? Does the way you use your attention support your goals and align with your values? How might we practice attention differently?
I designed that course in the spring of 2021, with the idea that I’d teach it in a post-pandemic spring 2022. I was imagining that, after all that time on zoom and in our houses, we’d gather in person and try out lots of ways to reconnect with our attention and each other. That wasn’t quite the reality of that spring, of course—my semester began with me getting covid and missing the first week of teaching, and though we were in person, we were also (quite wisely) wearing masks all semester. We began the semester by reading “To Gather Together” by Erika Meitner, which imagines a post-pandemic life in which we might
summon everyone
back to this abundant & skeletal planet
after we’ve jettisoned the billionaires
into space.
As I was getting ready to teach the class a second time this spring, I realized I’d missed something important: it’s not enough to just practice enough; we have to care for our attention, too. So this semester, we’re reading Jenny Odell and doing all kinds of fun activities related to the central ideas in that book—but we’re also going to try out all kinds of experiments to help us learn how to better care for our attention. I thought I’d pop in here a couple times along the way and share what we’re trying and how it’s working. I really believe that caring for your attention is one of the best paths into having a happy writing life.
