An Act of Attention - a happiness how-to

AN ACT OF ATTENTION

(Pre-script: Sorry these beginning posts are so long -- they will get shorter once the explanatory stuff is out of the way. For the impatient, the happiness exercise is in bold type, as are my run-ins with them. The quotation marks indicate a book excerpt)

"To allow happiness to save your life, I am advocating two steps.
The first is to try to see, hear, smell, feel the world around you, at least once a day.
Really notice light, clouds, rain in puddles. Feel the air on your skin. Or in the supermarket, notice the pyramids of fruit, the colors, the textures, all the abundance. Or take a shower and really feel the warmth of the water sluicing down your skin, the steam in your nose. Close your eyes and just feel it. Try not to think of anything else.
Then, take the Act of Attention to another level. Create something from it. Bring a small notebook and a pen or pencil wherever you go. Then you can write or draw your experience of your Acts of Attention. Writing for me is easiest, although sometimes I draw, too. Remember, this is for your eyes only, so you don’t have to be intimidated. Use the medium that feels most comfortable, or a combination. No one else will see your drawing or writing unless you choose to show them. This is only for you.
You don’t have to produce anything akin to Leonardo’s notebooks the first week, or ever. God knows I haven’t. Nor does your writing or drawing need to be particularly “creative.” This is initially, at least, only a tool to remember experiences, to recreate them and to have a record. If you feel that you must be “artistic” it’s doubtful you’ll do anything but create more pressure in your life.
Keep It Simple
At first, just notice the day. Write the date and time, your estimate of the temperature, generally what the weather is like—cloudy, sunny, snowing. And one or two other observations, after really attending to some aspect or aspects of life around you. Squirrels are good. “There is a squirrel in the backyard.” Then try to draw it or describe it. “A fat and happy squirrel, getting ready for winter. It seems redder than other squirrels. It just looked at me. Maybe it’s observing me, too. It has little beady eyes.” Remember, it doesn’t have to be a profound Act of Attention. It just has to be one.
If you’re thinking now, “How can noticing a squirrel, then making an inept drawing of it make me happy? This project is a dumb waste of time,” I’m sure you’re not alone. But these will be your Acts of Attention, your drawings and writings that will be aids to your memory. The moments of happiness, or simply moments of attention in your own life. Believe me, they will eventually accumulate and make you appreciate your life and your self more than you ever have.
What You Will Need
1) This book, for a while. How to use it: read it through, doing the exercises as they come up (or the next day if you don’t have time while reading). Then embark on the thirty exercises at the back of the book, one for each day of a month. Then you can repeat them, or make up your own.

2) A notebook and a pen or pencil.
(Choose them well. The notebook should be a size that is easy to take everywhere, to carry in your backpack or purse or shirt pocket, depending on how light you travel. The paper quality should suit your writing tool. I like juicy pens, so I need pages that will not bleed through. They can be lined or unlined, whichever you prefer. The notebook should be bound well so that pages don’t fall out. Experiment with paper, pens and pencils. Find what you like best. This is important. You must enjoy using them, whether you use a designer pen and notebook or a #2 pencil and your second grader’s discarded Malibu Barbie notebook.)

3) Twenty minutes a day (less if this is not possible, but twenty is optimal).

That’s all.

Getting Started
So you have your notebook and your pen. Set aside twenty minutes. Sit in a comfortable place in your home, at your kitchen table, in a recliner, on your bed, out in your garden if you have one. Write the date and time. Now look around you. Write something about the first thing you see. Really look at it, as if you’d never seen it before. Then take your time writing, drawing. You don’t have to speed, you can be very deliberate. Really look before you put pen to paper, then think what you want to say before you write. “There is a water glass on the table. It has a blue tint to it, and swirls in the glass. It is from my mother’s house. I remember it came from a box of laundry detergent, a long time ago, when I was a child.” Then write about the next thing. “The curtains in this room are faded, like ivory. They would look really good if someone embroidered on them, in pale colors.” “My dog is chewing a rawhide as big as his head. The end looks all soft and smushy, like dough from him gnawing at it.”

THE FIVE EASY PIECES EXERCISE: Write about five things you see. Write whatever you happen to observe or think about them. Write only a few sentences for each object. Then if you like, you can draw them as well. Try not to be too critical. Try not to incorporate your own feelings, unless they are either fairly neutral or positive feelings. Go.

If this has taken you twenty minutes, that’s fine. If not, look at more things, describe them. Draw them if you want. If you commit Acts of Attention to only three objects, that’s fine, too, as long as you use all your time. Then stop and read what you wrote, look at what you drew. Do not judge. Close the book and wait till tomorrow.
Congratulations. You have started on the road to being happier."

OK, so here are my five easy pieces, from the garden that I can see out the window, as it is raining massively and I wanted to start with the garden:

A fan of chives, the green of the stems dripping, and the puffed heads of the flowers, the color of the thistle crayon in the BIG box of Crayola crayons. Always it was one of my favorite colors, along with sea green and salmon. The kind of colors you would only need in bottom of the ocean mermaid coloring books.

There is a large plastic owl in the garden, the kind they sell in hardware stores to keep the crows from stealing the seeds. Only there is a huge and shiny and rain-soaked crow perched atop the owl, looking very pleased with himself.

Marigolds, which surround my bedraggled basil plants at the stage where they’ve not decided whether to flourish or give up the ghost. The basil seems kind of transparent, as ghosts are portrayed. The marigolds, however, are almost wildly bright and look pleased with themselves.
A pot of geraniums, whose leaves I love, circles of green with darker hearts inscribed on them. I tend to notice the leaves more than the flowers, even though these are bright screaming pink and want to be admired beyond reason.The leaves yet remind me of Fantasia flowers, although it’s been forever since I saw the film, the images are still vivid in my mind.

Rhubarb. Talk about leaves. I made a hat from one on Sunday, remembering a Eudora Welty character making her baby a hat out of a leaf. Oh, it was Gloria in Losing Battles. One of the best summer books. But rhubarb is the quintessence of spring. It’s sharpness, it’s pink and greeness. Made a strawberry rhubarb pie. I got the crust right even though it was not pretty. Flaky and crisp and delicate brown, with the filling leaking a little, just enough to glaze the edges a bright berry pink.


So, that took about twenty minutes to write. Could have written more except that I was distracted by my mother coming in and asking, “Are you writing?” I nodded my head. She continued right along. “There are some good specials at Big Y, but I don’t like to park there. And I don’t like the aisles being so narrow. You know, I saw a cat in the garage the other day. I don’t know, I think it’s terrible that people let their cats roam around...” I try to just carry on, and I don’t know, I guess I really started doing this blog to save my life (see my profile, which should be up v. soon). And no, I’m not 14 years old...but the five easy pieces exercise did make me happier, it really did. Hope it does the same for you.






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