“If you can fill the unforgiving minutes…

With sixty seconds worth of distance run…” - Rudyard Kipling

Of all the tools Spirit delivered to you the day of your birth, the capacity to direct your attention may be the greatest of them all.

We pretend as adults that we are too sophisticated for something so basic and primal as Attention, we build worlds filled to the brim with the hunt for the illusive something that will finally give us rest, peace, tranquility and contentment. We seek to manipulate the outer world, until the world we live in is so fraught with dis-ease and discomfort from our manipulations, that she might just rise up one day and send a virus from which we cannot recover.

We search the length of our lives for security, comfort, power, and control…seemingly without the slightest awareness that nothing we can do will eliminate the fate that awaits us all. The “from dust and to dust” that is the outcome of every human Being’s great adventure.

Until now - in the modern world - we live bounded on all sides, by folks who lack the capacity to pay attention. We have alphabet soup names for it, and drugs to combat it, we lose our children to it, and our relationships suffer greatly, because we cannot slow down enough to regard one another at even the most basic level.

Yet, hidden…and quietly so…in the depths of this simple but godlike tool of Attention, is the key to freedom that ALL the world round is searching for.

Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, who was nominated in 1967 for a Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King and who has authored more than 30 books, writes of this most basic tool of Attention in one of his compelling but simple stories.

It seems he was hosting a group of students for a simple evening meal and with the meal concluded, and end-of-meal-tea yet to be offered, one of Hanh’s students volunteered to do the dinner dishes for the venerated and elderly monk.

The monk declined his students offer with this explanation…”no, I think not, for you do not have the will to do the dishes correctly”. The student, having the good sense to not take the Master’s rejection and it’s potential lesson personally, inquired as to how he could fail at such a simple and easy task. And the Master replied…”you will do the dishes so that you can finish them and move onto the after meal tea and conversation, I will do the dishes for the sake of doing the dishes.”

Here Hanh is attempting to teach his hurried and harried American student the value of being entirely involved with the current moment, no matter how mundane, how simple, how seemingly useless, or inconvenient.

In the monastery where Hanh took his early training he was required to carry the incense stick with both hands, while he ever so slowly approached the altar upon which he was to light the slender stick. An incense stick weighing hardly more than a paper clip, required the use of both his hands, so said his Master…”so that you will learn the proper method by which to honor and attend to the lighting of the incense”.

Nadia Boulanger describes the lack of Attention in this way…”Life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece.”

Life denied.

That is a harsh, demanding, and very accurate diagnosis…Life is denied, or becomes Anti-Life when we lack the will and the capacity to pay attention to the moment at hand. It isn’t easy, in the forgetfulness of adulthood; to train the Attention…I’ll give you that…

Rudyard Kipling, in his poem If, “If you can fill the unforgiving minutes with sixty seconds worth of distance run…”

It isn’t easy to fill the unrelenting minutes with sixty seconds of distance run, the distance Kipling is referring to cannot be found on any map, is not a part of some geographic location…but rather is the soul’s full involvement in the ordinariness of our daily life. The ego in us wants to live for tomorrow, and the imagined arriving of our greatness and with it the admiration of kings and commoners alike… but the Soul in us…wants attention paid to the dishes, and the window washing, and yes even the masterpiece writing.

Isaac Newton, who shaped our understanding of the physical world in which we live, said this about the extraordinary value of Attention… “If I have ever made any valuable discoveries, it has been due more to patient attention, than to any other talent.”

For years I hung on ladders - in very uncomfortable circumstances - paying attention to the tiniest of details, while painting murals I had been commissioned to produce.

Occasionally I would have a client whose temperament or conditioning would cause them to find my slow and precise handling of their home’s or business’s a burden or a disturbance. “Hurry up” their energy or behavior would indicate, and I would feel compromised and pulled off center by their need for speed, and the cutting of corners.

I don’t know how or when my desire for paying attention began, but I know without equivocation that strengthening my commitment to paying attention and the excellence that results from it, was the only thing that kept me hanging on those ladders for so many uncomfortable years.

And I also know without doubt, that the newly discovered capacity for the Sweetness of Life that accompanies being fully present for window washing, dish cleaning, or the writing of masterpieces is a product of the increased Will to Attend, to the everyday and the ordinary.

Henry Miller said, “The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.”

We live in a culture and a moment in history, where we have taken individuality to an extreme, and have come to think of our lives as having a great overreaching “purpose”. Finding one’s Purpose has become a new type of seeking that distracts and confounds us…it drags our attention into the future and turns the present moment into an obstacle to overcome, or in the worst of cases, an active enemy.

We live in a type of suspended animation, awaiting the arrival of some future moment, while all the days of our lives sift thru the hourglass one grain at a time… for which we not only are not present, but are actively resisting.

Here is where our suffering is manufactured, the clever egoic mind like a siren pulling sailors onto a rocky shore, sings the song of tomorrow…. while our hearts yearn and cry out for our Attention… to the ordinary, the mundane, the moment by moment life that is pulsing thru our veins and showing up disguised as boredom, “nothing to do”, “nowhere to go”, “nothing happening”.

It is only when you can enter the Silence, surround yourself in the welcome relief from the chattering mind, bathe yourself in the harmony of your own attention, that you can come to know the truth which William Blake writes so poignantly about, in his poem Auguries of Innocence…

“To see a world in a grain of sand,

And heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.”

Your purpose?

You share the same one with every human ever born, or yet to be born…to develop and expand the capacity to become aware…not of angels or light-filled phenomena, that is just more of the clever ego’s doing, no – you are here to pay attention to wake up in your life, just as it is in this very moment. Imagine a world filled with Awakened mechanics, or waitresses, or bus drivers, politicians, or surgeons, or Teachers…a world where each one…gives and receives the boon of Attention. You can see it, can’t you? A world free of stress and pain, a world of kindness and care, of love and harmony.

Your reward?

Heaven, eternity, infinity, and grace beyond description, is hidden in plain sight. Right here, right now, in the midst of dishwashing, check writing, meal preparation, car-pooling, and corralling dust bunnies.

I know it is hard to believe…but that doesn’t prevent it from being True.

So take up your responsibility, shoulder your portion of the world’s salvation…do as Mary Oliver suggests, “To pay attention this is our endless and proper work.”

Adayre R. Miller

8/24/10