A thousand small fires
We treat attention as just one thing, often an object to be optimized and maximized; harvested and mined; hijacked and medicated. We hardly ever hold it sacred, nor with enough curiosity to marvel at its chameleon form.
What we miss in our abstraction - our conceptual view of what something is - is that attention is not a resource; that’s an incomplete and limited metaphor we use out of habit. But I don’t want you to just take my word for it… so, notice your attention with care over the next few minutes as we read together. Just notice, without words.
I used to think slowness was the cost of doing something well, a tax I paid grudgingly. But then I realized I’d caught the order backwards. Slowness isn’t the cost of the attention… it is the attention. The quality and totality of presence that we bring to each moment.
Since this realization, I’ve developed new behaviours and practices to notice what arises in that deeper sense of presence. It’s helped me to see what I never used to see when I was rushing through life: the second pass that reveals a kinder word; the extra pause to allow a clearer idea to arrive because the door was open just a moment longer; the longer hug that gives us one more moment together.
Ambition doesn’t see those moments; it reaches right past them, grasping at what’s next.
The rushed version is never the finished one. It’s the unfinished one, delivered on time.
Fire is the great grandmother of social media.
Michael Stevens, on The Rest Is Science: The Importance of Soft Fascination
My son, Damien, sent me this video on Monday - he didn’t know I’d started writing these notes and he couldn’t have known what role this piece was going to play this week. I’m grateful for whatever forces are at work behind space and time to connect the threads that weave our lives. And I’m deeply touched because I felt seen… he said: “Yeah I thought you would enjoy it, especially the second half.” You know me so well!
The Rest Is Science: The Importance of Soft Fascination, with Michael Stevens and Hannah Fry. Clip from 34:46 to the end of the episode.
It opens as a playful science chat about what fire is. But the back half, the 20-min clip you see above, is a profound discussion about attention that is worth every minute invested. In it, Michael Stevens offers a view that long before a social feed, fire was the thing we gathered around and stared into for hours. And the staring, as it turns out, was doing something.
He and Hannah Fry walk through what psychologists call soft fascination: the kind of attention a fire, or the ocean waves, or rain on a window draws out of us without effort. The kind that holds us without demanding anything, and because it asks nothing, it restores us. It’s the opposite of the hard, effortful focus we’ve all learned to call attention.
This is the door I talk about leaving open. Soft fascination is the open door: the peaceful attention that isn’t a tax, but the thing itself; the state where the second look happens and the better idea arrives, because nothing is being forced.
We have swapped a thousand small fires for one bright screen; and the screen, for all it gives, never quite leaves the door open.
What’s the fire in your life, the thing that can hold your attention without effort?
This week, find your fire. Not just metaphorically… literally. Light a candle and look at it. Do something that asks nothing of you. Give it 5 unhurried minutes with no meaning or outcome attached, and notice what your attention does when you stop making it work.
If you want to extend the practice, you’re welcome to make use of a list of beautiful questions curated in the Seed Bank.
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