Weekend Attentional Practice #2: The Look Slowly Challenge

[u/Phukovsky]

I look for different ways to play with my attention on weekends. Here's what I'm doing this weekend (inspired, in part, by an attentional practice from the School of Radical Attention). Give it a try!

The Setup: Pick one ordinary object. Your coffee mug. A houseplant. Your hand. A tree outside your window. Set a timer for 10 minutes.

The Practice: Look at it. Just look. Don't take photos, don't sketch it, don't describe it to anyone. Simply observe for 10 minutes.

Here's what you may experience:

• First 30 seconds: "Okay, it's a mug. Blue. Has a chip on the handle. This is dumb."
• 2 minutes: "Actually, there's this weird shadow pattern I never noticed..."
• 5 minutes: "The glaze has these tiny bubbles frozen in it. How did those get there?"
• 8 minutes: "This thing has been on my desk for three years and I'm just now seeing that the handle isn't actually centred..."

Why This Works: We live in a world of 17-second glances. That's the average time people spend looking at a painting in a museum. Our brains are trained to extract the gist and move on (a pattern exacerbated by modern tech, imo). But when you force yourself to keep looking - really looking - your attention has nowhere to run. It has to go deeper.

The Challenge Part: Your mind will revolt. It'll scream that this is boring, pointless, that you should check your phone. That resistance is exactly what we're training against. It's the same resistance you experience when struggling to maintain focus on an important proejct or studies.

After 10 minutes, you'll have seen something that's been in front of you all along. More importantly, you'll have just proven you can hold your attention on something utterly ordinary for longer than most people can focus on anything.

[u/kiltedinpdx]

This is a meditation technique. Lawrence Leshan discusses it in his book How To Meditate.