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“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote in her remaining assortment of essays. In 2021, the poet Leila Chatti took up Oliver’s phrases, reflecting on the problem of them: “All day, the world makes its demands. There’s so much of it, world / begging to be noticed.”
For these of us working to decelerate, to odor the roses, to look each other within the eyes fairly than within the iMessage bubbles, Oliver is an ideal information. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in 2019, “It was not Mary Oliver’s intent to critique this new world—and it’s hard to imagine she even owned a flip phone—but her poetry captures its spiritual costs.”
The world makes its calls for, and distraction has each private prices and societal ones. My colleague Megan Garber has neatly famous how an overload of knowledge and a fracturing of consideration makes folks, and Americans specifically, much less outfitted to fulfill the challenges of the second. “Today’s news moves as a maelstrom [of] information at once trifling and historic, petty and grave, cajoling, demanding, funny, horrifying, uplifting, embarrassing, fleeting, loud—so much of it, at so many scales,” she wrote in 2021.
An absence of consideration is harmful. But we’d additionally spend time fascinated about the great thing about its presence, what consideration offers again to those that pay it. I’ll go away you with a couple of extra of Oliver’s phrases: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”
On Attention
“Attention Is the Beginning of Devotion”
By Franklin Foer
The late poet Mary Oliver warned in opposition to wanting with out noticing. In an age of distraction, her work is extra pressing than ever.
The Great Fracturing of American Attention
By Megan Garber
Why resisting distraction is among the foundational challenges of this second
Mister Rogers and the Art of Paying Attention
By Adelia Moore
The beloved kids’s-show host knew what was on the coronary heart of human relationships.
Still Curious?
- “Moccasin Flowers”: Oliver celebrates the gorgeous fervor of life within the face of oblivion with characteristically easy and poignant verse.
- The battle for consideration: We could reside in an endlessly distracted world, however the place we focus our gaze nonetheless issues.
Other Diversions
P.S.
If you’re fascinated with studying one other poet whose work focuses on consideration to the small print of our lives and the way we share these particulars with others, decide up one thing by Maggie Smith. I like to recommend her poem “First Fall.”
— Isabel