Details

- attention, amidst 40 flights and bonkers 5AMs

I just Googled “quotes about how attention is healing.”

Because I’ve traveled way-2-much these 4 months. 40 flights. In order to remain tethered to sanity, I’ve paid attention to details - anchoring myself in stuff like:

• the perfume of this eager chick in the TSA line. It’s citrus and musk and light. (I don’t call anyone “chick” but I’m trying it out, respectfully.)

• the jade earrings of the lady scrolling Tik Tok, cap pulled low, rims of her glasses inching down her nose.

• eye contact with the Lisa (she looks to be a Lisa) clutching her McDonalds brown bag, in her tennis skirt, tossing her buoyant “BLESS YOU!” like a softball, because I sneezed twice while she passed.

Thank you, Lisa.

People are everywhere at airports. It’s wild.

Smushed close in human schools of fish, swooshing through terminals. When I look up from my phone & cease to dilly dally (gr8 phrase!!! Bring it back!) - when I pay attention - I feel less bonkers for being awake at 5AM in Chicago. Less adrift, more myself amongst other selves.

So - I was saying - I Googled “quotes about how attention is healing,”

And here are some good ones that you could’ve Googled too, but I gotchu:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

David Foster Wallace

Pay attention. It's all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.

Susan Sontag

I like that David uses the word “unsexy,” although attention is actually a skosh sexy (vocab: skosh), or - as one of my best friends says - it’s “punk rock.” Because aren’t we all vortexed into our phones all the time? And isn’t it cool when someone makes brief (not too long, or it’s unsettling) meaningful eye contact with you… a stranger who smiles your way and acknowledges your singular life upon this earth?

Wouldn’t David have called that kinda sexy?

Susan would think it’s sexy, because her quote talks about how attention is vitality, and vitality is sexy.

If you would also like to practice attention (and be a little bit sexy), stay tuned, because in this Substack cozy corner, I’ll share vignettes of attention: episodic details I’ve loved, noticed, and experienced with care (and humor) lately.

Please - in the meantime - tuck into this photo series, as I sit elbow-to-elbow with this tall grandma at an O’hare work station near L9.

See ü soon.