I’m always giving my consulting clients assignments: Read this book. Listen to these interviews. Watch this movie. Could they be more accurately called “prescriptions”? The sessions in and of themselves are a bit therapeutic in nature, but the object of the therapy is just writing. Writing can be daunting, though, and I remember when it daunted me. A large part of why I might be taking in so much culture might be so that I can give good prescriptions, but it’s also simply because it’s what I like to pay attention to and I like to think along with other people who do the same.

Whether you complete the assignments is up to you, but from my own workshops and visits to classes and talks, I can tell that people are seeking cultural guidance and are desperate for a way into deep attention. 

There are no shortcuts here. Attention is a muscle, like any other, and I’ve been working on my own lately by going through my Criterion Collection list rather than easing into television in the late evenings. I’m reading more mentally strenuous or lengthy books by the chapter, morning by morning. I’m checking the news only in the morning and evening; print magazines are a scrolling substitute at the dog park. I’m listening to podcasts and the occasional audiobook while I walk Benny. I’m putting on WFUV on Fridays, to listen to the music someone else has chosen.

I’m making ritual of my attention and by doing so, I’m strengthening it. My attention was always ritual when I was younger, every new magazine or book or movie or album a holy object to be pored over until I knew the liner notes and jacket copy and casts and mastheads by heart. Every political crisis sucks people back into the corporate apps ever deeper, though, and there is reason for this: It’s a way to share information and resources, to get money to those who need it. 

But it’s also a drain, a way of removing us from the world, and it suggests to us that our attention, if placed elsewhere, is being misused. This is false and unhealthy, and it takes strength to reject. There’s a dance here, and we have to be conscious of it; if there’s one thing the corporate apps hate, it’s your consciousness and care and cravings for depth. As the writer P.E. Moskowitz recently asked in Mental Hellth: “Is your reliance on discourse a sign that you are intellectually under-stimulated?” Algorithmic corporate social media benefits from that under-stimulation by getting us hopped up on stressful or soothing input, depending on what it thinks will keep us using them longer.

When I think about attention as a ritual, I remember when I had a job I hated on Long Island right after college—one I’d drive to in my 2006 Scion xA, and occasionally I’d sit in my car before work listening to Democracy Now! on WBAI and cry about war, police brutality, and the general miserable conditions of the world. When Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 came out, I started to take the train a short distance so that I could have more time to read it, and doing this got me into town really early, and I’d go get a breakfast at the bagel shop and eat it relaxed and my brain would feel so much different, so much more expansive. It’s the high I’ve been seeking ever since, losing it and gaining it back over and over. It’s the high that taught me I hate cars. It’s the high that first let me know that in whichever pockets of time I could take control of my attention, I had to do so. 

Someone once asked me how I knew how to take care of myself so well, which was really a question about how I knew what to pay attention to, and I think the answer is the same when people ask me how I do research or what I read or why I write, and it’s in this instinct I had to take the train to work in the suburbs when I was 22 so that I could pay attention to a long book and eat an unhurried breakfast. Sometimes the meaning of your life is revealed just like that.

Life is, though, of course, a balance of crying at the state of things and enjoying our breakfast. In between, we figure out what to do. Ideally with a deep breath.

Here’s what I’ve been spending my attention on—the reading, watching, viewing, and listening that have kept my head above water: