Paying Attention

If you know me, you know I love details. You know I pay attention to things and that’s what makes life worth it to me. To aimlessly wander through situations without taking in the temperature, cloth, taste of it all, you’re missing everything.

This week while driving, I saw a bumper sticker, which arrogantly proclaimed:
If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.

I protest. I would like to meet this person driving in front of me and ask him what he means. I would argue that one has to pay attention in order to see the loveliness in life. The things to be outraged about are huge, plenty, impossible to miss. Read the news. It is outrage after outrage. Conversely, when was the last time you saw a headline that made you feel inspired, lovely, secure? I feel strongly these days you have to go on a walk to feel stuff like that. What I know for sure is that to see the immense beauty in the cross section of life, you have to pay attention. Closely, actively.

A few weeks ago, while walking to my car, I stopped. I looked at a pinecone on the asphalt. I laughed out loud because it was absolutely joyous. It was just perfect, lying there in a mundane world with a great deal of work to do. If I had stared straight ahead, or at my phone, or even into the sky looking for birds, I’d have missed it. But I practice paying attention.

Yesterday was particularly rich. First warm day of the year, so I went for a walk and helped myself to peering into the open garages of my neighbors as I passed by on the sidewalk. I longed for surprising things. There was a full bar, a Trump sign, a stroller, a refrigerator with construction paper art, speed limit signs, Bounty paper towels, a Craftsman toolbox. One door was open just a foot off the ground and all I could see was emptiness and two stripes of sunlight. That was most impressionable. Further on was one winter glove that someone had placed on a sidewalk marker. I just stood there taking it in like a giraffe at a tree. In the quiet expanse of the rows of homes, here was a hand reaching skyward, as if saying, I do not care if I am called on to speak or if I ever attain what I am reaching for, but I will reach, and proclaim, and desire life unabashedly and without hesitation. That was honey.

Today while driving, I rolled down my windows and turned on the classical music radio station. Coming upon a highway, I recalled a television program I had seen about the Autobahn—perfectly smooth and made for high speeds—and how the man on the program had described driving 160 miles an hour while blaring Beethoven. I can’t think of anything more majestic. So, as I turned onto this highway, I pushed the speed limit and rocketed the volume of the orchestra in my radio, and I just, well, I lived.

Truthfully, I wasn’t really speeding. But if I had been stopped and asked why I was going 10 over the limit, I would have told the officer that I was just trying to recreate the atmosphere in the universe that occurred when I was born, because this, I imagine, is what it both felt and sounded like. Regardless, just as I slowed to a red light, the music ended and the DJ told me calmly that I had been listening to Leonard Bernstein conduct the Vienna Symphony Orchestra through Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2. Of course it was. It couldn’t have been anything else.

Does anyone else have the great desire to go have a sandwich with Leonard Bernstein and see if he is as impassioned about choosing his condiments as he is about ordering his string section?

The next musical selection was a string quartet, and when it ends and the applause hits, I clap too, because I’m at the crest of a hill and I think life needs some acknowledgment. Because I’ve been paying attention, and it is abundant. We do not need more outrage; we need more gratitude.

It has been awhile, I decide, since I have been outraged. It probably had to do with a veteran committing suicide, or a child not knowing how to read. Still, I feel more sadness at injustice than rage. A child with no books does not make me want to scream. It makes me want to take the child’s hands in mine and bring her to this bench on which I’m currently sitting. It makes me want to direct her gaze outward and to teach her to watch the white sails of boats maneuver the Chesapeake Bay, like swans with nowhere in particular to be.