The Spiritual Practice of Paying Attention

We live in a world that constantly competes for our attention.

Every notification, advertisement, headline, and endless scroll seems to insist:

Look here.

Buy this.

Worry about that.

Keep moving.

It isn't surprising that many of us struggle to notice what is happening within us, around us, or with God.

When I think about the practices that have been shaping my own life recently—spiritual direction, retreat, mending clothes, creating handmade things, studying ethics and spiritual care—they all seem to share one quiet invitation:

Pay attention.

I've come to think of this as a spiritual practice: learning to slow down enough to notice what is already here.

Paying attention is not easy.

If we want to be attentive, we necessarily have to slow down, focus, and allow other things to take a back seat. It asks us to, as Dallas Willard famously put it, "ruthlessly eliminate hurry" from our lives.

Paying attention changes us.

We change in the process of slowing down and quieting, of prioritizing what really deserves our attention, time, and energy. But we also change because the quiet, slower pace of life allows us to hear what we otherwise might miss in the rush and noise of a busy life.

Growth rarely begins with having better answers. The impulse to research more, study more, practice more is good, yet we can become so focused on acquiring new information or improving ourselves that we miss the importance of noticing what is already here—in front of us, within us, and around us.

Slowing down allows us to notice the thoughts we keep pushing away:

The sources of our resistance.

The grief we've been (intentionally) too busy to feel.

The joy we rush past.

The invitations that have been quietly present all along.

I am as much a willing 'victim' in this lack of noticing as anyone - intentionally numbing myself with activities and tasks rather than doing the deeper work within. Ugh! It's hard work, often requiring uncomfortable actions that will move me toward the person I want to become.

This past season, for example, that has looked like biting the financial and self-discipline bullet and beginning a master's degree in my late 40s.

It has required me to take a hard look at how I spend my time and to reorient myself toward sitting still long enough to write papers and produce the articles and other work I've wanted to write for more than a decade.

Attentiveness has required me to notice not only what I want to do, but what I am actually doing with my time, energy, and attention.

Attentiveness isn't confined to explicitly "spiritual" activities either.

When I'm mending a garment, I might wonder:

How has this garment served me?

How do I feel when I wear it?

What do I want to communicate through this mend?

How does Divine Love mend my rips, wounds, and worn places?

When I—and God—mend things, can they become "better than new"?

What is my relationship with mended things compared with new things?

How has the world around me influenced the way I see new and old things?

Those questions lead me somewhere deeper than the garment in my hands.

Reading and researching for my graduate studies has become another practice of attentiveness. This time around, unlike during my undergraduate degree, I'm paying closer attention to what I'm reading and how it intersects with what I have learned through my own life experience.

I'm learning not simply to swallow what an author, professor, or theologian tells me is true, but to wrestle with it. To notice what resonates, what challenges me, what raises questions, and what I might need to reconsider.

Moving through the natural world invites a different kind of attentiveness.

In my garden. At the lake. When we travel. What does the environment - the plants, animals, climate- show me about who God is? What do other cultures, their practices and how they view the world, show me about who God is? What is drawing my attention? What might that attention be inviting me to contemplate about my own spiritual formation?

The more I notice the sheer volume of invitations to pay attention in everyday life, the more I realize that attentiveness lies beneath, beside, and around everything I care about.

Yet our culture makes attentiveness remarkably difficult.

Advertisements promise that happiness is one more purchase away.

News headlines demand immediate emotional responses.

Our calendars fill.

Our minds race. (Mine tends to short-circuit because of overwhelm...)

Even our leisure is often designed to keep us consuming rather than noticing. Ugh.

I certainly understand why the invitation to attentiveness isn't an easy one.

Many of us feel distracted and disconnected—from ourselves, from one another, and from God.

I don't think the opposite of distraction is increased productivity.

I think it is attentiveness.

Not the kind of attentiveness that anxiously scans for problems to solve, but the kind that

slows

down

long

enough

to notice what has been quietly present all along. That kind of attention doesn't come naturally. It must be cultivated. Practiced. Returned to again and again.

Like many people, I know what it feels like to be pulled in ten directions at once. I know the temptation to distract myself from uncomfortable thoughts or difficult emotions. I know how quickly I can move from one task to the next without ever asking what is happening beneath the surface. Yet every meaningful season of growth in my life has begun with noticing.

Noticing joy before I rushed past it.

Noticing grief I didn't want to acknowledge was there. (Ugh.)

Noticing desires I had long dismissed.

Noticing invitations I hadn't realized God was extending to me.

Receiving spiritual direction is one practice that has helped me hone this way of seeing.

People sometimes imagine spiritual direction is about finding answers or receiving guidance. In my experience, it is more often about learning to notice:

Where is Life stirring?

Where is resistance arising?

Where is Love inviting me to respond?

Spiritual direction is less about asking, "What should I do?" and more about questions like:

What are you noticing?

What feels life-giving?

Where do you sense invitation?

What is drawing your attention?

These are deceptively simple questions built upon a foundational understanding that Divine Mystery wants to engage with us and is already moving in our lives. These questions help us notice it. These kinds of questions invite us into spiritually formative relationship rather than performance. Into curiosity and wonder rather than certainty. Into attentiveness to what is already happening rather than striving to make something happen. It leads me to think that attentiveness isn't simply one spiritual practice among many, but the soil in which all spiritual practices grow.

Prayer asks us to pay attention.

Silence asks us to pay attention.

Worship, celebration, giving, serving others, and ethical practice all ask us to pay attention—to ourselves, to others, to the impact we have on the people and environment around us, and to the Giver and Sustainer of life.

Even making things by hand, the practice of mending, of tending plants, children, pets - they ask us to slow down enough to notice.

This is what all my work—spiritual direction, retreats and zines, handmade garments and accessories, amplifying other artisans' work—keeps returning to:

the invitation to pay attention.

and the treasure that noticing offers us.

It is not an easy practice in our current society. But it does have the capacity to change us—and, perhaps, the world around us.

Movement toward a deeper spiritual life isn't necessarily about learning something new. Sometimes it begins by noticing what is already there.

What has been there all along.

This blog, my work in spiritual direction, and my work making and selling products are all part of this lifelong practice of learning to notice.

If attentiveness is something you are already, or want to begin, practicing in in your own spiritual life, I'd love to hear about how you're doing it.

What are you noticing?

Let's journey together.