This is wonderful about paying attention. (From an interview by Rachel Syme with Laucy Dacus)
'She mentioned a game that she used to play on car trips. "It's called Fall in Love with a Tree," she said. "The first tree you see in the distance, you just look at it and notice everything about it that makes it more special than the other trees.
She figured that the exercise could easily be applied to buildings, and homed in on a glass tower in the financial district.
"I'm picking it because it's not as noticeable," she said. Suddenly, a halo of white lights began to glow on the building's roof. Dacus smiled. "I made it light up."'
Which reminds me of something Clive James once said (apparently):
"Happiness is a byproduct of absorption”
All of which is very pro-attention, like:
"The Zen master Ikkyu was once asked to write a distillation of the highest wisdom. He wrote only one word: Attention. The visitor was displeased. “Is that all?” So Ikkyu obliged him. Two words now. Attention. Attention."
(Dept. Of Speculation - Jenny Offill)
But unfocusing that attention is also good:
"The economist John Maynard Keynes once offered advice on how to conduct oneself in a bookshop: A bookshop is not like a railway booking-office which one approaches knowing what one wants. One should enter it vaguely, almost in a dream, and allow what is there freely to attract and influence the eye. To walk the rounds of the bookshops, dipping in as curiosity dictates, should be an afternoon’s entertainment. This is very different to the advice you’d give someone on how to use Google, which, in Keynes’s terms, is more like a railway booking-office – a place to visit when you know your destination. But a truly curious person knows that she doesn’t always know what she wants to know about."
Or at Tom puts it you can 'rewild you attention' Which led to a trail of good thinking including CJ and this from Ali Montag about trying to escape attention when thinking about your work and the advantage of the attention of a small group of friends.