Undiluted Attention

About a year ago, as I sat on a train taking me home from a family wedding, I struck up a conversation with the young woman in the seat next to mine. She was younger than me by about ten years, and on her way to do a research project on the university that she hoped to attend the following year. Our conversation was short and fraught with uncomfortable silence, but that night, I went to bed satisfied, like I had refreshed my brain by giving it new feeling.

I always try to be ready to have a bad conversation. I don’t want it to catch me off-guard. I start out very suspicious of everyone, worried that they might take advantage of me or, worst of all, laugh at me, incredulous that I thought we could have been sharing something. I ask about the other person, I try to have topics on the back burner, I try to make sure nothing bad happens.

Of course, we’ve all had bad conversations. Maybe we left it too charged up, or feeling unpleasantly empty, and we don’t know how to get to the next moment.

It might have been when someone talked at you without drawing breath and then walked away. You felt yourself become their audience, their sounding board, watching them perform their show. You first feel frustrated, then too full, weighed down with too much that you never signed up for.

Or maybe you were the one talking and you left feeling empty, hollowed-out, not full enough, tasting the sandwich of marshmallow fluff on Wonder bread, the auto-cannibalism of swirling around your own head. You felt emptiness that seemed like perfect fullness, at first.

I’m convinced that the too-full, too-empty swing (when I experience it) comes from my diluted attention, a near-constant free-association that clumsily joins what’s happening with what I’m already thinking about. I feel compelled to have opinions on everything, as I’ve been taught to do in school, still afraid of looking foolish or disengaged when the teacher calls on me. In other words, I feel compelled to make sure nothing bad happens.

The holiest space I occupy is that of conversation. Whether it’s someone I know or a stranger I’ve met on the train, when I am talking to someone, that is where I feel it, where I feel that most important thing happening. When it is being done poorly, I know instantly. Undiluted attention is a glimpse into another world, an other-world.

The woman on the train took up my whole vision. I wanted her story and she wanted mine. I was insecure and neurotic, but I looked at her and saw only her. It was a small glimpse of the light, of perfect imperfection, of what communication could be if I tried to do it right, if I took it seriously.

When I stop free-associating, when I intentionally purify the subject sitting in front of me, I can see the light, that little ray of understanding, the MOST IMPORTANT THING, god shining into me through another person’s eyes.

Whole universes open up if they are given space.

On that train, I saw this universe open up, because I gave it space. I felt completely, fully, human.