Tanya | Week 11 | Moments Unnoticed
There are thousands and thousands of things happening around you right now, at this very moment. There are so many things moving and existing, and so many sounds. But, you hear almost none of them. That is, until I mention them, and now of course they are all you can focus on.
Everything that you don’t notice, however, doesn’t cease to exist just because you don’t acknowledge it.
No, it continues on, but only on the very edge of your mind. And then, once you decide to divert your attention to these distant occurrences, the more that other things take their place, and everything else proceeds to disappear from your experience.
That one clock you have, the one on the wall of that one bedroom in the corner, that clock is going to keep ticking, because time does not ever stop, no matter how much we sometimes wish it would.
Certain plants in a garden will grow more or less due to the amount of attention they receive from their owners.
Our pain, our emotions, and our very thoughts seem to suddenly intensify the second that we notice they exist. But when we suppress them and push them down to the deepest recesses of ourselves, we are barely able to notice them, if at all.
All of this is to say, our attention is one of the most truly influential powers that we possess. If we make the conscious decision to pay attention to something, that thing now exists in our awareness, and is therefore important to us. If we do not make that decision, everything in the background will continue to move forward, just with less influence.
But is the very thought of that not at least somewhat terrifying? Is it not a little bit scary that it’s possible for our entire lives to pass us by because we forgot to wake up and be mindful? People always say to “live in the moment,” and they could not be more correct. I myself have a bit of a tendency to “float” through my days, especially the past couple of months, as I feel like I am sometimes barely half-aware and going through the motions of my life, without stopping to enjoy it or even live it.
And the more I notice this, the more that I realize that I do not want to wake up one day many years in the future and wonder where all my days disappeared to. For this very reason, I am determined to be more present and aware, so that I can give power to all of those things hiding in the background.
Tanya, thank you for writing about this topic this week. It has come at such a perfect time for me because lately, I have been noticing myself letting experiences go without truly living through them. I have been so focused on the future that I have been forgetting to pay attention to the present. The magnitude of how much is going on around us is truly astonishing. Whether it be during the day or in the dead of night, there is never a time in our lives where we are the only things existing. The image I always rely on to remind myself that there is so much going on outside of my own experiences is just imagining a miniscule dot on the globe and reminding myself that I am smaller than even that speck. It is also incredibly powerful that you mention how much many of us wish that time would stop. There are moments that feel so perfect that I wish I could live in them forever and there are also moments where I feel such dread for the future that I wish I could hit pause so I never have to reach them. This blog also reminds me of a concept I learned about that is known as working memory. It essentially says that there is a part of our short term memory dedicated to things we are actively thinking about. Once information leaves our working memory, it is either permanently stored or it is forgotten. The reason I bring this up is because it relates to what you state about keeping everything in our awareness. Unless we make a conscious effort to think about our surroundings and our experiences, they will leave our minds forever. I share your fear of waking up one morning and regretting the way I lived my life right now. I thoroughly enjoyed reading your blog and I will be making an effort to start living more mindfully.
ReplyDeleteHi Tanya! I find your blog a beautiful way to start my week, as I have caught myself unable to “live in the moment,” instead pushing myself to focus on only what I can, then moving immediately to the next. Rarely am I able to actually take in the surroundings around me, watching the people around me, listening to the birds chirping outside, or watching the leaves rustling in the wind. One sentence in your blog, about the blog continuing to tick in the corner of my bedroom wall, really speaks to me because of how I realized you’re right. Nothing ever waits for us, and time will keep slipping away. It is up to us to learn how to manage our time or to do what we must, since no one else can do it for us. I, too, find it terrifying to think about how much time has actually passed that I wasn’t mindful of, or the number of opportunities I have missed by only focusing on one thing. I have been so focused on the future that I haven’t been able to focus on the present, and when I think about the past two months, it has also been a blur. I find your blog extremely refreshing and a turning point for me. Starting today, I will try to live more mindfully.
ReplyDeleteSome days I feel like I do notice all the things all of the time, like being able to hear every single person in a room breathing or smell all the scents at once, and I guarantee that even if someone would want that for themselves to better “live in the moment,” it is not worth it…I may not be diagnosed, but something definitely runs in the family. Regardless, even if we were always able to notice absolutely everything all the time, it’s not like anyone would be able to process it properly. Some things have to fade into the background for us to make decisions; even the omniscient narrator has to pick and choose what to mention. The human brain gets overwhelmed into a stupor rather easily, I have found, watching my friends scroll on their phones at lunch.
ReplyDeleteBut it’s like you said about our attention being “one of the most truly influential” things we wield, that’s why it is also one of the most valuable things companies are vying for. They benefit from us being overwhelmed by a constant stream of information, consuming without processing, always feeling like we are running out of time.
The first half of your blog also reminded me of a part in one of my favorite books (which I always wholeheartedly recommend to anyone who listens) called The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett, where the main character, for a brief moment, is gifted the ability to see everything. She gives it up, of course, concluding that it’s “[n]o wonder we dream our way through our lives. To be awake, and see it as it really is…no one could stand that for long.”
It’s funny (and by funny I also mean a little sad) how when students get overworked, we turn to existentialism. I hope we all make it through this year. Good job on your blog!
Hello Tanya! The idea that we do not pay attention to many things really reminds me of sonder; the realization that everyone around us has the same complex life that we do. When we are growing up, we often just care about ourselves and see everyone else as "side characters," but through attention we realize that everyone else is the main character of their own story.
ReplyDelete"Floating" through my days has basically been me for the last 16 years. I never really really cared to do anything and honestly had no goals than the standard: go to school, get into a good college, get a well paying job, have a family, then die peacefully. And that goal is something that people with a lower economic status would dream of doing, but as someone who has many opportunities and paths in the Bay Area, we have the power to choose what we want to do. The philosophy that you mentioned of not regretting all the days wasted really hit deep for me. Only recently have I had that conclusion that we only have one shot at life, so we better make it count. Thanks for sharing!