Attention
I think I started to lose something important but I'm taking it back.
If I’d noticed it, perhaps I’d have been less surprised and dismayed by it, but the crux of the matter is that I didn’t notice it was happening. A whole ecosystem of not noticing was the problem: it only kept it more hidden out of sight. When the realisation came, later (thank you, thank you insight, you strange, unreliable beast), the obviousness of it left me feeling blindsided. The thing that had been hidden, the thing that I realised, was that somewhere along the line I had stopped taking photographs.
It felt ridiculous. I might as well have realised I’d lost a leg and not noticed. I am a photographer! I have 6000 photographs on my Instagram account! I wrote a chapter in A Still Life specifically about how I take photographs as a way of moving through the world. And yet it struck me: ask me to show you a photo of something I saw or did in the last year (perhaps even the last two years) and I’d be hard pressed to show you much at all. Somewhere, sometime, I just stopped. And, worse than that, I didn’t even realise I’d done it.
Some symptoms are more frightening than others, I think. This one shook me because I knew it meant something had gone wrong with me. Because of the way I use my camera, I knew it meant I wasn’t really looking at things in the way I should be, or the way I used to. Sure, I am still a noticer at heart. I still notice details, I might even remember some when I come to write an essay or a chapter or a blog post, but I haven’t been spending long with anything for a while now and I know I haven’t because, if I had, I’d have taken a photo. I’d have had a record.
That’s what photography always was for me — a way of holding still. You look, you stop, savour, you take a photo. Not to be clever, not to have something to show off, but in reverence, in worship. It was like prayer. Because if you really take the time to see something, you find you have to respond in some way, to the goodness of it all or the heartbreak. Because taking a picture gives you a way to say thank you or I’m sorry or I’m listening or this matters, or the hundred other words that tumble out of you when you take the time to look at your life and really, properly fall in love with it so hard it breaks your heart.
I tried to remember the last time I approached my life like that, like it was a vigil I couldn’t turn away from, and I couldn’t remember. Maybe a handful of times, but those times were getting rarer. Oh god, they were, weren’t they? I was losing something. I could feel it. My lack of photos felt like I’d been handed a clinical report. This means something. Something is broken.
I looked for a culprit. I looked at the phone stuck to my hand and noticed how many times I interrupted a moment to reach and scroll. Yes, I have that disease, same as the rest of you. I don’t know many that have been spared it. To sit and to focus on anything for any length of time now feels like a heritage skill threatened with extinction. It has affected me the same way it has affected everyone else, and I wanted to howl when I saw it clearly. No. No. Not me too.
The other reason, when I figured it out, was sadder and quieter and more difficult. I have been all up in my own head. For years now. I have been all up in there, suffering, worrying, ruminating. So much so — my overthinking has become such a galloping, unstoppable force — that these days, I forget to look out much. I have been lost in myself, every day a little more so. Stress; just stress. Painfully human. A terrible mistake.
Of course, as soon as I’d dragged all this out into the light, things began to change again. They’re not changing quickly — I am still ending too many days realising I’ve barely looked up from my own self concerns — but I have a renewed resolve and I’m looking again, painfully, at my habits; where my energy and my attention rests each day, and where it doesn’t.
So.
I put my phone downstairs, in my bag, in another room.
I turn away from the persuasive pull of my thoughts; their insistence that the answer is with them and actively resist the temptation to think and think and think myself sick.
I resolove to pause, often often
I will notice what is here with me.
And I will take a photo.
I put a finger here on the tip of the iceberg, I know, I know. Everything represents everything else. Fear and technology and change and disaster and anxiety and discomfort and that horrible, horrible temptation to just numb, to reach for the thing that makes it all go away for a little while. And the fact that we do it now, don’t we? We reach for the easy thing, more and more and more.
But that is what is here this month:
me, pulling my camera back towards me, my notebook back towards me, my attention back towards me, resolving to do better.
Below the paywall this month: a personal video from me sharing some lovely personal news and giving you a quick tour of a place that’s given me so much hope for my future. I hope you enjoy it.
Did you hear my other piece of good news, too? Letters From Wonderland has been longlisted for a Wainwright Prize in their children’s non-fiction category. A huge surprise. I still can’t quite believe it!
