Notes on Paying Attention

Anything in life can be richer and sweeter if you slow down and pay attention, but some things reward attention more than others. The different amount of rewardingness per attention is socially constructed and thus arbitrary to some degree. But it's genuinely nice, to have others who have also paid attention to the thing tell you about the interesting parts that you might have missed, and this can enrich your own experience. But relying on others to tell you what to pay attention to, and how, is also a bit of a trap. Because each person's umwelt is slightly different from the next, your preferences might legitimately differ from the horde. And only after articulating/distinguishing/understanding your own preferences can you go out into the world and find the other things that will delight you. C.S. Lewis puts it well, in The Problem of Pain:1 You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that…