Paying Attention

Reserving our best things for better days

When we were in high school, I believed—very sincerely—that my life had not started yet.

I don’t mean this in a melodramatic way. I was not despairing. I simply regarded myself as unfinished, like a document saved under a temporary name. The final version would appear later, in a much more impressive location.

There would be distance involved. Possibly California. Certainly adulthood. Somewhere at a safe distance from the present, where everything would make more sense and I would know, without hesitation, what mattered to me. Somewhere with better light and fewer questions.

Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, 2017.

But my friend didn’t seem to be waiting for anything.

Most afternoons we spent together were already going somewhere, even if we weren’t. We were always in the car, or about to be in the car, or getting ready for something that we might or might not want to go to. Her room half-destroyed from picking out our outfits. Music perpetually playing. Our evening plans forming and dissolving at the same time.

She would take me home from school, windows down, Post Malone blasting out of her speakers, and I remember thinking, very clearly, that there was nowhere else I wanted to be. Which almost never happened to me.

The thing about her was that it never felt like she was trying to make things special. There was no effort in it. She just rejected the idea that things weren’t already.

She spent all she had. That’s the clearest way I know how to say it. Time, energy, attention. Money disappeared the moment she had it. Ice cream was always split and shared. She would pull out her expensive makeup — the kind you’re supposed to use sparingly — and apply it generously to my cheekbones while we sat on her bedroom floor getting ready.

She wore outfits that suggested a destination far more interesting than the one we were going to. She used her best perfume every time she left the house. She put on skirts that brushed the tops of her thighs to go to Panera with me and do homework together, which is to say she declined to downgrade the moment simply because it had failed to announce itself.

Most of us reserve our best things for better days. She behaved as though the day in front of her was the only one she’d been waiting for.

Joan Didion, New York Times

Yesterday marks three Decembers without her.

When I think about her now, the memories I cherish the most are not attached to anything exceptional. They’re tethered to the most ordinary occasions: sitting in cars, standing in line, doing homework, passing time.

It has occurred to me since that if the ordinary moments were the ones worth remembering, they may also have been the ones worth attending to all along.

It has taken me years to understand why those memories feel so intact. And now I believe it’s because they were fully attended to.

Somewhere along the way, I had learned to treat the ordinary as beneath my attention, even while believing it remained worthy of His.

But that December, I began to suspect that what I had dismissed as small was precisely what was being counted.

I had quietly assumed that while He might be interested in souls, destinies, and large moral gestures, He would surely excuse me from being attentive to a boring Tuesday afternoon.

I believed in God’s care without quite believing in the importance of what He cared about.

And in this process, He asked something far simpler — and far more demanding — of me.

Attention.

Once that is returned to its proper place, life stops waiting to begin. For God, who has always been present to the moment, does not need later. And once I stopped insisting on it, neither did I.

I wear my best perfume even if I’m not going anywhere special. I order the coffee that tastes better and sometimes costs eight dollars! I write people cards. I say hello first. I reach out first. I say what I’m thinking. Sometimes I misspeak. Sometimes I say the wrong thing. I give a lot of compliments. I ask people a lot of questions about themselves.

For a long time, I believed my life was on its way to me. The days, meanwhile, were just what I walked through to get there. They were background. Necessary, but not decisive. I treated them like rehearsal.

The problem with this idea is that rehearsal never ends.

And at some point, it becomes clear — almost embarrassingly clear — that there is no opening night coming. The hallway you thought you were passing through turns out to be the room.

And the life you imagined approaching from a distance one day is already happening, one ordinary day at a time.

We like to think of our “life” as something big and meaningful and our “days” as small and repetitive.

But the day is the only place life ever actually shows up.

What you do with your hands today is what you do with your life. What you say out loud, what you notice, what you make time for, how you spend your days is how you spend your life.

This realization is strange, not because it’s complicated, but because it’s so obvious it feels like a trick.

We’ve been waiting for a better moment, a clearer occasion, a version of the day that earns our attentiveness. Meanwhile, the day we’re in keeps arriving on time, asking for nothing more than our attention.

Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird, 2017