How do I begin to think about slow attention. I am writing this at my kitchen table. Radio 4 is playing the background and there is a discussion about the ethics of eating chicken. Chickens live for 35 to 40 days on average before they are killed for meat.
I have many documents open in my desktop. An application for a an arts residency, notes from my first PhD meeting. I have many more tabs open on my Google browser. Some for marketplace, browsing old furniture for no particular reason, others relate to the residency and checking the organisers so that I can fine tune my application. There are many open which relate to my work, calendars, virtual classroom portals, a trip I ran last week, the swimming pool up the road, which I decide against this morning.
Perhaps some of my wanting to investigate slow attention is to sit with this volume, both of size and sound. I have turned off the radio and now I just hear the productive tapping of my finger tips on my keyboard. I instantly think of the abstract notion of the cloud and where these words will find a holding place. Not abstract at all, but powered using a lot of energy in, I assume, a huge warehouse space.
Now I hear the light bulb above me and the ringing. I can taste the bitter coffee in my mouth still and I can tell it’s rained as a car passes the font of the house and I hear tyres on the wet road.
This is part of an exercise that I set some of my students to ask them to consider their approaches to being an audience. Think about your five senses I suggested; this might seem odd, but all these are managed by our brains and bodies in more or less conscious ways. And yesterday, I read about research methods which extend these ideas further. Merleau-Ponty using the term vision to refer to a sensing system that interconnects all our senses. And Susan Kozel who talked about Bainbridge Cohen’s separation of senses and feelings, that senses relate to the nervous system through perception and that feeling and flow are ‘related to the fluid system including the circulatory, lymphatic and cerebral-spinal fluids’. But I’ve also been reading about how all these senses are interlinked, and leak into one another. And this is reading I subscribe to I think.
I break, to make my son a cup of tea and wake him up and my attention is brought to different parts of my body and awareness.
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