Creative Attention

• Kenneth Grahame, “The Fellow that Goes Alone.”

I think it was my third month of living in Xiamen, and during a spontaneous walk home from work, that I saw the leaves sway in the wind – saw them in away that I was overwhelmed by the texture and the contextual movement within the space around them… Of course, I had seen branches blowing in the wind my entire life and many times before I had even seen them in this way. It’s the kind of seeing that Huxley describes in “Doors to Perception” when states that if we ever just really looked at the fabrics of our world, we would never have the desire (or the time) for the distractions of modern entertainment again. This instance struck me and I realized that it may have been the first time I had been quite so present in this place, in this chapter of my life, in this current track of consciousness I was building for myself.

I had spent my first three months in Xiamen disentangling myself from my previous relationship, a task with which I was nowhere near finished. I was also learning, slowly, how to navigate a new social world where people spoke endlessly about weekend plans and whoever was not in the room. Between these two changes in my life my mind had become a place of constant anxiety. If I was not ruminating on some past mistake, I was attempting to prepare for some imaginary event in my own constructed future. How would this person that I am now, this single, lonely, broken, independent person respond in a given situation? I would tell myself such preparation was a useful reflection or necessary planning. In truth, there are words from a book I read three or four years ago, with some hyperbolic title like “How Yoga Saved My Life,” that remind of my own subscription to the belief that such anxious prepping has more to do with egotistical fear than honest reflection.

Nonetheless, it is within that mental space that I spent many, many weeks in Xiamen. Distracted, obsessed, exhausted and isolated in a city of 3.5 million people. As I watched the leaves dance in the wind that day, it was as if something had been shaken loose. I looked around and saw, as if for the first time, the beauty that was all around me. The kind of beautiful that becomes even more breathtaking in its own ordinary nature. “This is what I am missing,” I thought. “This is the opportunity cost of spending so much time obsessing over things that are unlikely to ever happen. I don’t get to see this.”

Inhale. Exhale.

I spent the remainder of the walk home letting my mind flow where it would but not sticking onto any anxious thoughts. A mile or so later, I found my mind wandering onto topics I had not found the space to consider in too long. Topics that genuinely mattered to me, as opposed to those I was merely afraid of. I found myself lost in thought, directed only by the path under my feet, the sun overhead, and the leaves, blowing in the wind.'