Before the pandemic, I traveled every spring with my husband and his company’s top sales performers. Inevitably, Ryan would get cornered throughout the week by someone wanting to talk shop. Whenever he was grabbed by the elbow, I never minded being left alone with these high-achievers. “I want to know how you spend your time,” I’d say to them as if they were interview subjects. What productivity apps did they use? What systems helped them set goals and track progress?
I’ve asked Ryan this question, too. I’m married to the man, so perhaps it should be obvious to me how he manages his time. But truthfully, I didn’t know how he kept track of the variety of projects and people he has to manage. “I don’t manage my time, Jen,” he told me. “I manage my focus.”
As I write a book about time and its anxieties, I’m growing to understand that managing time is a myth. We don’t control the hours any more than we control the arrival of winter’s first snow. But it is true that we can, at least to some extent, manage our focus. We can decide what to give attention to and what to ignore.
That is an important point Stephen King makes in his book, On Writing, which I’m finishing for my MFA. King suggests that the “strenuous” reading a writer must engage is a matter of deliberate attention, especially the willingness to turn off the tv. “If you feel you must have the news analyst blowhards on CNN while you exercise, or the stock market blowhards on MSNBC, or the sports blowhards on ESPN, it’s time for you to question how serious you really are about becoming a writer. You must be prepared to do some serious turning inward toward the life of the imagination. . . . Reading takes time, and the glass teat takes too much of it.”
(I read this—and then proceeded, that same night, to finish two episodes of Ted Lasso.)
It’s not easy to give undivided attention to anything these days. We are endlessly distracted. But attention is, in fact, the very thing our friendships, our families, our spiritual lives, our vocations are starved for. To read Simone Weil, who died in 1942, is to realize that fragmented attention isn’t a consequence of the smartphone era. Attention has always been a faculty that requires disciplined cultivation.
In her essay, “Reflections of the Right Use of School Studies with a View of the Love of God,” Weil argues that attention is the faculty we cultivate in academic study as well as in prayer. Attention is the capacity for sustaining interest and curiosity. It’s the capacity for rigorous and careful engagement. Better is twenty minutes of undiluted attention, says Weil, than three hours of “frowning application.”
If Weil is right, the habit of attention might be called a spiritual discipline. It’s a worthy reason for making New Year’s resolutions regarding book reading. Maybe it’s setting the goal to read every day for a certain amount of time. Maybe it’s finishing a certain number of books in a year. Maybe it’s reading books in a different genre than we’re familiar with. Maybe it’s gathering a group of people to form a book club. Maybe it’s keeping a small notebook with reflections on the books we read.
As we cultivate the faculty of attention, Weil writes, we are developing our capacity to love. “So it comes about that, paradoxical as it may seem, a Latin prose or a geometry problem, even though they are done wrong, may be of great service one day, provided we devote the right kind of effort to them. Should the occasion arise, they can one day make us better able to give someone in affliction exactly the help requires to save him, at the supreme moment of his need.”
In other words, finishing a book may be a service to our neighbor.
Recommended
The Common Rule by Justin Whitmel Earley. Our small group will begin reading this together soon, and though many of you may be familiar with this book already, it’s certainly one to consider reading as you ring in the New Year. Earley’s book is all about cultivating the habit of attention for the sake of spiritual formation. He suggests eight “habits of purpose for an age of distraction.” There are four daily habits (kneeling prayer three times a day; one meal with others; one hour with phone off; Scripture before phone) and four weekly habits (one hour of conversation with a friend; curate media to four hours; fast from something for 24 hours; Sabbath). The book is intensely practical, and of course I also love that it is centered around habits.
Reading
On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
On Immunity: An Inoculation by Eula Biss
Waiting for God by Simone Weil
A Timbered Choir by Wendell Berry
Good Burdens: How to Live Joyfully in the Digital Age by Christina Crook