On a hike in the Drakensberg, a friend challenged our walking party to do something radical. She encouraged us to sit in silence, with our eyes closed, and listen.
As the chatter of conversation and mind fell away, the mountain landscape came alive.
I heard the whisper of the wind through the trees and the majestic call of an eagle soaring high.
On another hike, in the Waterberg, a friend offered the same gift of intentional silence.
This time, I heard the gentle symphony of a flowing river and the distant calls of a baboon troop.
These moments of deep listening made me reflect on how rarely we truly pay attention in our modern lives.
I was raised in a family where silence was viewed as awkward, something to be filled rather than savoured.
Even now, while I’m comfortable in solitude, I often rush to fill quiet moments in social settings. It’s as if silence itself were a blunder, rather than an opportunity for connection and wonder.
What if these moments of quiet attention are exactly what we need in our increasingly fractured world?
Virginia Woolf understood the importance of paying attention to life’s ordinary moments.
In everyday experiences, she saw the essence of living, likening them to a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis – delicate, transformative, and worthy of our full attention.
It’s an apt metaphor for how we might approach our daily lives, finding wonder in the seemingly mundane, if we only pause long enough to notice.
This art of attention becomes even more vital when we consider the concept of “interbeing”, introduced by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.
His teaching suggests that everything is interconnected and that paying attention to one aspect of our world inevitably reveals its connection to everything else.
When we truly attend to the steam rising from our morning coffee, we might see the morning sun that warmed the water, the farmer who grew the beans, the soil that nourished them, and the rain that fed the soil.
Each moment of attention becomes a window into the vast web of existence. The challenge is maintaining this quality of attention in a world designed to fragment it.
Psychologist Barbara Fredrickson’s research suggests that positive emotions, like wonder and curiosity, expand our awareness and build our capacity for new experiences.
Sometimes this means unplugging, to notice the small wonders we might otherwise miss.
The way sunlight patterns dance on a wall, the subtle changes in birdsong throughout the day, the complex choreography of strangers navigating a busy street.
It’s a virtuous cycle. The more we pay attention, the more wonder we find, and the more wonder we experience, the more inclined we become to pay attention.
The practice of attention might begin with those moments of intentional silence on a mountain trail, but it doesn’t end there.
It extends into how we read, how we listen, how we engage with media, and how we interact with others.
It’s about developing attention literacy, the ability to direct our focus in ways that enrich rather than deplete us.
In our rush to fill every silence, check every notification, and consume every bit of content on our social media and news feeds, we risk missing the quiet wonder that surrounds us.
The solution isn’t to retreat from the world, but to engage with it more mindfully, to cultivate spaces of silence and attention in our daily lives, and to find a balance between connection and contemplation.
Those moments in the mountains taught me that attention, like any art, requires practice.
It begins with permission to be still, to listen, to notice.
In doing so, we might discover that the world is full of butterflies emerging from cocoons, in moments of ordinary wonder just waiting for us to pay attention.
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