We Are Changed By What We Witness

Cultivating The Skill of Attention

Pax appreciating the beauty of Lake Garda.

One weekend afternoon two or three years ago, I was sitting next to Pax on the couch. He was holding my iPad in his lap using YouTube for Kids while I took a break. Curious as to what he was watching, I looked over and was struck by what I noticed. Pax would click on a video, get part of the way through, and then, click on another video from the sidebar. He would only partially view this new video before returning to the sidebar, scroll through the options, and click on a different video. This happened repeatedly. This was not his default behavior when engaging with other media. When watching movies or a Golden State Warriors game, he had what I thought was a precocious ability to stay focused.

Pax, I asked eventually, don’t you want to finish watching the video you started?

I did watch it, he replied.

I deleted YouTube for Kids soon thereafter.

***

This essay is not about screen time. There are plenty of opinions out there about screens and kids, and a growing body of research that you can turn to if you are curious about the impacts of screen use on things like language development, executive function, and stress. This essay, rather, is about attention. 

I deleted the app because it was training my son to fragment his focus in pursuit of novelty, training him to believe that the what-might-be was a preferable choice to the what-was-at-the-moment. Over and over and over, in repeated intervals, it was attacking his capacity to pay attention. 

This seems to be happening to all of us. Dr. Gloria Mark has spent over two decades as a Professor at UC Irvine studying and researching attention, and in particular, how our minds and behavior have changed with the rise of digital media. Her research indicates that our attention spans are diminishing, averaging just 47 seconds on any screen for any particular task. 

Reading, for me a proxy of attentional capacity, is on the decline. According to the American Time Use Survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just 17 percent of Americans are reading for leisure on any given day, a record low. (H/t to Mark Isero of Article Club for bringing this to my attention). And, according to the American Psychological Association, less than 20 percent of U.S. teens report reading a book, magazine or newspaper daily for pleasure. 

I observed this decline in sustained attention when I taught at Stanford. Over the course of my five years there, devices intruded into the learning experience more and more, along with increased restlessness, cross-talk, and general distraction. Undoubtedly, the trauma of the pandemic played a role. But, if I had to guess, it hadn’t caused what I observed, but rather, it accelerated what was already emerging.

This Op-Ed in the NY Times speaks to the scale of the issue:

“High school and college teachers overwhelmingly report that students’ capacity for sustained, or deep attention has sharply decreased, significantly impeding the forms of study — reading, looking at art, round-table discussions — once deemed central to the liberal arts.”

All of this has me wondering: What is my responsibility as a father to cultivate the attentional skills of my children? In what ways does this matter? 

***

While attending a gathering hosted by The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society in 2011, I learned about an art history course taught at Amherst College entitled “The Art of Beholding.” In that seminar, each student picked one painting to focus on for the entire four months of the semester. One. Over the subsequent weeks, they came back to this singular object of study again and again. Some of this took familiar forms, like researching the artist and the context in which the art was created. Much of it, though, might have been unfamiliar, perhaps even uncomfortable. They practiced being with the painting, exploring all aspects of it intimately, whether composition or brush stroke or color, letting it reveal more and more of itself through ongoing devotion, until they arrived at a point where the “knowing” wasn’t just in the mind, but an embodied sensation. I imagine that to get there they had to persist through boredom, frustration, and distraction. 

So what was the impact of taking a class like this? At least for one student, it was life changing, helping them to see differently. They applied this skill of beholding to their relationships, concluding: “I feel that I am truly learning how to love for the first time.”

The goal of the course, as described by its teacher Professor Joel Upton, was to “address a fundamental crisis in the condition of our lives: namely, estrangement from ourselves, from each other, and from the world in which we live. The art of beholding becomes synonymous with love …. it can be applied to all areas of life. [It] is not a class about art but rather a way of understanding… [of] deep relationship.”

The use of the words “estrangement” and “love” struck me. They remind me that attention isn’t just a mechanism for applying focus to take in information. More than that, attention is the mediating factor for our relationship to anything in our lives. This could be an academic subject or an athletic skill, another person or even oneself. The more attention we shine on something, the more intimate we become with it, understanding all of the features and nuances below the surface. When we don’t pay attention, we drift away and become strangers to it, and it to us. 

***

Choosing, or choosing not to, pay attention implies agency. Unfortunately, we have unwittingly created powerful systems that disrupt and steal our attention, as well as the choice of where we place it. The Op-Ed I referenced earlier observes: 

“We are witnessing the dark side of our new technological lives, whose extractive profit models amount to the systematic fracking of human beings: pumping vast quantities of high-pressure media content into our faces to force up a spume of the vaporous and intimate stuff called attention, which now trades on the open market.”

It’s one thing to contend with this as an adult. But, what happens when this interferes with the very development of attentional skills? If attention is how we experience our lives, and we’re subject to “attention fracking,” it feels like my responsibility as a father for developing the attentional skills of my children is a significant one.

There is a lot at stake.

Our children will not only inherit a future from us. They will actively shape it with their choices and actions. Their capacity for prolonged attention, on anything, will be a prerequisite skill for engaging with the existential, complex challenges of our time, whether that’s the climate crisis, the ramifications of AI and quantum computing, systematized dehumanization and violence or the widespread loneliness, alienation, and mental health challenges that plague us. It’s not an exaggeration to say that how they wield the attentional capacities of focus and deep understanding, if they can wield them at all, may determine how our species turns out. 

Yet, it’s not just their future that is at stake. Their now is also on the line. Life has beauty and joy to offer, but it requires contact with our attention for us to notice, perceive, and experience them. A poem only blossoms in the light of repeated contemplation. A sunset fading from orange to red to purple to midnight blue only provokes awe if we can take it in and not be dominated by the urge to capture it for later viewing. Reconciliation only happens when you can endure the discomfort of the difficult conversation and keep your attention steady despite strong emotions. A song, a dear friendship, a lover’s touch, a sublime bite of food, a riveting novel, the scents encountered walking through your grandmother’s kitchen - all of life’s treasures require us to pay attention. And when we do, we are enriched. 

As Angeles Arrien reminded us: “We are changed by what we bear witness to.” 

***

I’m happy to report that despite screens and video games, Pax’s ability to focus is alive and well. He can still lose himself in a read aloud of Charlotte’s Web, when listening to The Cat in the Hat podcast or when reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid. However, this is front of mind for me because of what’s at stake, and because, while school is teaching him all sorts of things, I’m not sure the skill of attention is an explicit priority.

Thus, the question I’m holding is: How might I teach my kids to care for and nurture their attention, to strengthen and fortify it for the challenges, as well as for the gifts, ahead? 

While I’m just at the beginning of my inquiry, one thing is clear. Like with other facets of parenting, it starts with me, with what I model. How do I behave with my devices in front of my sons? How do I listen to them: fully, half-listen, or not at all? How do I treat the interstitial moments of my life that seem insignificant and ordinary? Am I mindful? Or mindless? Am I aiming the beam of beholding on the important things in my life, like my relationships, or am I on autopilot?

How I show up will transmit as much to them, if not more than, what I might “teach” them.

I’d love to hear your ideas. How are you approaching this? Or, if your kids are grown, how did you think about this when you were raising them? Resources and recommendations welcome!

Let’s practice. Together.

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