Attention Turns Us Inside Out

Everything gets more real when you dive into it wholeheartedly: dancing, dying, whatever. You let yourself realize that this is what it has all come to…

In a late interview, Ginger Rogers told of how when they had practiced enough, and were actually performing a number in front of the rolling cameras, Fred Astaire would sometimes whisper in her ear, “Now you’re dancing!”  And she said she lived for those moments, which came only after she’d given it her all.

Here is Pema Chödrön discussing this slogan:

I have a friend who is extremely ill, in the final stages of cancer. The other night Dzongzar Khyentse Rinpoche telephoned her, and the very first words he said were, “Don’t even think for a moment that you’re not going to die.” That’s good advice for all of us; it will help us to live and train wholeheartedly.

Everything gets more real when you dive into it wholeheartedly: dancing, dying, whatever.  You let yourself realize that this is what it has all come to.  Nothing else is going on.  This is what is happening.  Your presence of mind, your attention, then becomes a magic staff that breaks the moment open into a suggestive gem — maybe an opal.

May we dive into the project of kindness so intensively, at times, that we disappear into the task, or rather, awaken within it.

Rather than think of the training in whole- and open-heartedness as a burden, it is up to us to enjoy it.  It is an active pleasure to bring the mind back from distraction and find that the person focused on, the task at hand, the issue being thought about or discussed, increasingly matters.

In my first Psychiatric Rounds at Roosevelt Hospital, many years ago, a psychiatrist was interviewing a long-term schizophrenic and asked him if he’d ever felt quite healthy and strong in his mind in the last 30 or so years since his first psychotic break.  The man thought and thought.  He said his mind was always somewhere else, wandering, worrying, imagining the worst. One day on an inpatient unit a nurse threw him a tangle of extension cords from a closet — a huge pile that had formed over years — and asked him to sort them.  It took an hour or more to disentangle them all.  He said it went on so long, and it was so absorbing, that he forgot everything else, and cohered, and came together as one whole person, and was well.

May we dive into the project of kindness so intensively, at times, that we disappear into the task, or rather, awaken within it.  Attention turns us inside out.

Michael Lipson, PhD is a Clinical Psychologist living with his family in Berkshire County, MA.  He is the author of Stairway of Surprise (2002) and Group Meditation (2010) both from SteinerBooks.  He teaches workshops in meditation and consciousness studies both locally and globally.