It’s been a rough back half of the week for my household. Our toddler has been sick and fussy, toggling between weepy desperation at his illness and sloppy mania when he’s felt just marginally better. (Falling down several stairs being one side effect of such sloppiness.)
Time has narrowed to a tunnel, and these long and exhausting sick days have a mantra:
Let’s just get through this.
It’s a bleak outlook, of course. It reminds me of Click, the awful 2006 Adam Sandler vehicle, where his character is gifted a magical remote that lets him, among other features, fast-forward through boring or difficult moments of his life.
The problem—I’m implicitly admitting, by the way, that this objectively bad movie made a real impression on teenage Taylor—is that the remote is self-learning, and begins to act on the character’s instinct to coast through boredom and difficulty, fast-forwarding through entire stretches of his life.
If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll remember that most of the movie’s action is just a dream that Sandler’s character has, having fallen asleep on a mattress in Bed, Bath & Beyond—the wishful thinking of the remote a cautionary tale about “getting through it.”
We all have a magical remote—it’s our attention.
In challenging times, it’s easy to grab out attentional remotes and hit fast-forward—in other words, to stop paying attention. It’s easy: binge-watch TV; stare at our phones; get lost in a book.
In doing the latter this past week—getting lost in a book, specifically Art Thinking by Amy Whitaker—I encountered a technique to shake me from my tunnel vision, if only for a moment.
…[A] habit called “good noticing,” in which you take whatever is happening—in your life, in your work, in your studio time, in your weedy explorations—and validate it by commending yourself for noticing it. No matter how disappointing the news, “good noticing!” orients you toward intimacy with your own experience. Instead of resisting things by wishing they were otherwise or getting fidgety with process and wanting to skip to the outcome, it is a way of giving yourself positive reinforcement simply for being engaged attentively.
Simple and easy advice. Grab hold of your attention—even just for a moment—and notice something.
Dripping icicles. A cat’s whiskers. The warmth of the sun. That poster on your wall. The weird phrase your colleague just used.
Good noticing.
Taylor Coe 