“Instructions for living a life:

Pay attention.

Be astonished.

Tell about it.” 

- Excerpt from “Sometimes” by Mary Oliver

1.) The way the sun finally came out today. I sat in its warmth in the corner window. I forgot what a ray of sun was like. I remember now. 

On the first day of February 2024, I began to write down one thing per day that I found beautiful or that brought me joy. Trying to find some peace and grounding during a particularly anxious time in my life, I stole the practice from a class I had shopped at the beginning of the semester. Every day write about one thing that brings you wonder, joy, or awe, the professor instructed us. Sitting in that cramped classroom, I wondered if this exercise would be the thing that would fix me. Soon after, sitting on my bed at the end of a long day, I opened up a slightly used journal and wrote down a moment that had made me smile. Then I tried to keep going, one day at a time. 

35.) Sparrows jumping in a puddle. Cloudy skies but they were finding joy, even in the remnants of the rain. 

Paying attention is not an easy thing to do. Our focus is drawn in a million different directions at any given moment: a conversation several feet away, assignments whirling through our minds, blinding headlights and our ears freezing in the Providence wind and our phones buzzing and buzzing in our back pockets. 

Herbert A. Simon, a psychologist and economist, coined the term “attention economy” in the early 1970s. The term refers to a system that “sees our focus as a finite resource to be captured and monetized,” a place where our attention is a currency that can be bought and sold. If that sounds alarming to you, I agree. While some see the attention economy as a sign that companies and systems are providing consumers with content most closely aligned with their needs, the idea also indicates that in order to make money, businesses will do anything to pull our attention. They move our minds to focus on what they want us to think about, rather than the things that will fulfill us or that we truly care about. The attention economy is the reason for ad-targeting. It’s why so much money is pumped into manufacturing trends and peer pressure. It’s the reason we think about that new device hours after leaving the store or closing our browser. Even the phrase “pay attention” connotes a commodity. Our inner thoughts are tradeable, whether we realize it or not. 

62.) Latkes. Crispy, delicious in sour cream and applesauce. Trying to find joy in the small things. It’s hard, sometimes.

Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights is a collection of essays stemming from a writing practice similar to my own. Every day for a year, Gay tried to write about one thing that brought him delight, joys such as a hummingbird in a dead tree or a purple infinity scarf or being tapped on the arm by a stranger. In the preface of the book, Gay describes how by engaging in this writing journey, “I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight. I also learned this year that my delight grows—much like love and joy—when I share it.” 

As I’ve gone through the practice of paying attention to joy for the past year, I’ve found that some days are easier than others. There are times when everything seems to go right, days when I go on long runs through the city and the Ratty serves coconut magic bars and I spend hours sitting on my friends’ couches laughing until my ribs hurt. But there are also times when things seem like they’re falling apart: I get in an argument with my neighbor and I have a project due the next day and the anxiety won’t stop playing pinball inside my body. The former days feel like they’re bursting with content for my little green journal. The latter appear to be dry wells. 

But looking back at what I wrote on those days when nothing seemed to go as planned, I realize how much more important those entries are. On days I would usually just collapse into bed ruminating on how awful everything was, I forced myself to look back and think about one good thing, no matter how small. It was a reminder that there is still beauty, even in the most difficult moments. 

256.) Curled up in bed, drifting off in a mid-afternoon nap. Sunlight at the edges of the blinds. Doors creaking, people laughing, wind and birdsong through the open window. 

Not only does the attention economy turn us into commodities in the eyes of businesses and algorithms, but it also sets a quiet precedent that we should distance ourselves from daily, non-commercialized life. When we turn our eyes to our phones in the middle of dinner, we cut ourselves off from the person across from us. When we focus on that massive, blinding advertisement over the freeway, we ignore the sight of the clouds racing across the sky. Every time we give our attention to one place that’s designed to capture it, we sacrifice it in another.

As we turn our focus toward the distractions of the attention economy, we don’t just threaten our relationships with the people around us, but also with the world itself. We look at our phones instead of interacting with our neighbors. We allow the lure of success and comfort and empty promises to blind us to the suffering outside our front doors. Children go hungry and forests burn, but we don’t notice because there are so many other things grabbing at our minds. 

You may be wondering why any of this matters. In our broken and breaking world, what impact could our attention truly have? Mary Oliver, in her essay “Upstream,” wrote that “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” To pay attention is to demonstrate a care for something else, a loyalty to a person or setting or moment, even just for an instant. Our attention will always be somewhere; what if we directed it toward the things we believe are worth fighting for rather than fleeting distractions? While it is not the cure, perhaps the first step to resisting these systems that keep us captive is to look up and look around. Attention is the beginning of devotion. 

…

Beauty gets lost when you stop feeling the need to notice it, I guess.

…

While I would love to say that I have maintained this practice consistently for the past 377 days, I only have 350 entries. For several stretches of time early on, during spring finals season and a short, tiring week of the summer, I forgot to log my daily observations. Or maybe I just stopped caring. After all, a few months of the practice hadn’t radically transformed me into a wildly different person, full of vigor and overflowing amounts of gratitude. What was the point?

It took a few tries, but eventually I got back to writing daily, and the habit stuck. While motivating myself to open up my notebook every night was a challenge, I ultimately realized it was nice to have a dedicated record of the beautiful things in my life. And as I devoted time to ruminating on joy at the end of each day, I began to notice it preemptively. As I smelled the eucalyptus in the rain-soaked air of my hometown, I filed it away to journal about later. When I watched a Carolina wren perch on my window, I smiled, thinking about how lovely it is to know another creature sees you. I rarely spent long pondering these moments, but as I looked up and paid attention, I learned to better appreciate the mundanity of everyday life and revel in the present. 

68.) 90% eclipse. The air chilling, sky duller, sun a sliver of a crescent. Blanket on the Quiet Green, blowing bubbles under the trees. 

On a clear, early April day, the Brown University student population left their dorms and their libraries, pulled out their picnic blankets, and sat outside. Across campus, people played music and annotated readings, periodically stopping to stare up at the sky, where the moon was slowly crawling over the sun. Finally, at 3:29 p.m., the air now cold and hazy, everyone halted all other activities, looked up, and cheered, reveling in the interloping moon and the thin slice of sun glowing orange through eclipse glasses. 

Reminiscing on the eclipse, it wasn’t just the wonder of nature that was breathtaking. It was the fact that thousands of people, on campus and across the country, stopped their usual activities, their scrolling and striving, just to be together and witness a miracle. We all took time to look at the world around us, and in doing so, we looked at one another. We chatted on picnic blankets. We played with bubble wands. We reclaimed our attention, took it back from the forces that want us distracted and malleable, and gifted it to each other and the vast sky above.

350.) The first peek of a new leaf, budding from my Monstera in the sun.

At the end of Mary Oliver’s poem “When Death Comes,” she remarks, “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” Statements such as these are common in Oliver’s poetry; her work frequently centers around themes of living and embracing life to the fullest, rather than simply enduring it. But too often we fail to follow this advice. We muddle about our days, barely paying attention to what’s right in front of us. Oftentimes we’re just trying to survive. But, as Oliver illustrates, doing so can be our final regret. 

I don’t think our phones or marketing or the general trappings of 21st-century American society are evil or wrong. These things have made our world more connected, created new art forms, and allowed for a variety of novel human flourishings. But I worry that giving too much of our precious, fleeting attention to our screens and our goals, rather than the world around us, will ultimately lead us down an isolating, limited path. We have to do more than just visit this world.

For the past 377 days, I have been trying to better notice this world as I live in it. Some days are still easier than others. Some days are boring or tiring, and specific moments of joy are not easy to remember. But I am learning to look up and slow down a little bit more each day. To get off my phone. To look around and give my attention to my fellow humans. To pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it. To devote myself to the beauty of the world.