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Attention
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7 min read

The art of being inconvenienced

In our fast-paced attention-deficient society, Elizabeth Wainwright reflects on the value of inconvenience as a safeguard against the commodification of life.

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

a newly laid hedge merges into an older one, next to a road
Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash.

It’s May as I write this, and I’m noticing Iris flowers everywhere. They don’t flower for long, but they are glorious when they do. There is another kind of Iris too - our newborn daughter Iris, born in May under a full moon; appropriately named the ‘flower moon’ in some cultures. And it really was a time of flowers - in her name, and in the Devon hedgerows outside which were bursting into life and nurturing a rainbow of wildflowers - pink campion, creamy hawthorn, yellow celandine, bluebell, violet, endless green. These hedgerows are ancient. ‘Hooper’s formula’ can give an estimate of just how ancient - counting the number of woody shrubs and trees in a 30m section and multiplying by 100 gives a rough estimate (one species for every 100 years). This makes the hedges and sunken earth-banked lanes around us well over 1000 years old, thousands of years in places. They feel essential to the structure of this place.  

The layers of land in this part of Devon are overlain and interwoven, sometimes reinforcing what was there before, sometimes obliterating it. Today the threat of obliteration looms larger than ever - development, forestry and rapidly changing agricultural practices all squeeze rural communities and landscapes to the edge. But these old hedgerows and earth banks seem to resist the march of development and ‘progress’ – continuing a line of resistance that stretches back to the local Celtic people resisting Anglo-Saxons, who in turn resisted the Normans. The hedges represent old ways, they hold their ground and ask us to slow down and prioritise other things than convenience and blind progress.  

Because for local farmers, it is not convenient to farm these small wonky fields with their thick-hedged edges. In other parts of the country, fields got bigger and bigger as hedges were ripped out, especially during the Second World War when food production was a priority. And the size of fields kept pace with the growing machinery used to farm them. Farmed fields in some parts of the country are now vast. But not here. Outside the window huge tractors thunder past, but they look out of place in these narrow lanes and small fields - old spaces that are less and less able to resist the damage of modern machines.   

I think inconvenience is good for love and for neighbourliness. Loving and knowing our neighbours are beautiful intentions, but they can quickly become easy words and abstract concepts.

But whilst these ancient hedgerows are inconvenient for modern farming, they are convenient for life, because things can exist here that wouldn’t if the hedges were removed - biodiversity, soil structure, shelter and food for countless species through the year; species that are under threat from intensive agriculture elsewhere. It is the inconvenience of the hedges and fields here that leaves room for life. 

I think about how this is true of other things; how inconvenience might bring life, how it might even be essential for our relationship with things that matter. Two specific things come to mind.    

First, I think inconvenience is good for love and for neighbourliness. Loving and knowing our neighbours are beautiful intentions, but they can quickly become easy words and abstract concepts. Putting the idea of neighbourliness into practice will be inconvenient - it will have an impact on me and my life, it will take time and might be awkward at first - but it is where the love and I think the hope is. The future has lately been sounding bleak - heatwaves and wildfires and temperatures higher than climate modelling has predicted; economies in turmoil; never ending conflicts. Loving our neighbour isn’t about niceness, or just for when it’s convenient – it’s for right now as the world burns, it’s for helping us know the world through the lives of others, it’s for rebuilding affection and life on earth.   

Second, I have found that inconvenience is good for knowing the Bible. When I first began reading it — curiously but non-committaly as a young adult — the thing that kept me coming back was its beauty. Much of its meaning was lost to me, but its sound and rhythm wasn’t. The Bible is inefficient, inconvenient. It is often impenetrable, mysterious, poetic. And poetry is often inconvenient - it asks us to slow down, to pay attention, to engage imagination and heart and feeling, to re-read something that might not at first be clear. And when its meaning or imagery sticks then it remains, I do not forget it. If the Bible’s authors wanted readers to understand something, to believe something, there are shorter and clearer ways to do so which might even guarantee particular outcomes like belief. But the Bible turns towards poetry and beauty and depth - not transfer of information, not efficiency, not convenience. It asks the reader to slow down and listen, to reach beyond the immediacy of information to another way of being and knowing. 

Another Iris speaks - not flower, not daughter, but a singer through our kitchen speakers - Iris Dement is singing a song called Working on a World I May Never See. It makes me think about the importance of investing in hedgerows and neighbours, a declaration of belief that their possibility offers more than the efficiency and productivity they sacrifice. Because we are not made for efficiency, or blind progress, or productivity. I think we are made to love, and to work on a world we may never see; an ask that I increasingly see requires not just ‘development’ and technology and financial investment, but investment in love and neighbours and place. But as the world hurtles on, love seems diminished, its power underestimated or increasingly it seems, unknown. I notice talk of love sometimes met with cynicism, as if it’s a warm fuzzy idea but not something to take seriously, as if it might be world-shaking. But I think it is — or it could be if we let it.   

And so I welcome inconvenience, I welcome the courage and patience it teaches me.

The hedgerows and my neighbours and parts of the Bible remind me to take love seriously. They slow me down with their long-way-roundedness, their use of 100 words or species where one would be more efficient, their conjuring of feeling and images where information might be quicker. They ask me to pay attention, they offer beauty, they bring my gaze to things they matter.   

In Eric Fromm’s 1956 book The Art of Loving he examines various kinds of love, and then explores the disintegration of love in the modern western world, which is in part he says because:   

“Modern man has transformed himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality market. He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.”

(All this written before the arrival of the ‘personality market’ of social media, and before Amazon’s all-consuming invitation to consume).  

In examining this commodification of life, and in a line that touches on our fondness for convenience, Fromm says:

“Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly. Yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains—except kill it.” 

He goes on to argue that love is not a sentiment but a practice; one that involves discipline, concentration, and patience. These aren’t things that a fast-paced attention-deficient society leaves much room for. He says too that

“Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole…” 

The hedgerows outside and the poetry of Bible teach me patience and concentration, and they shift my centre of relatedness outwards, from my own need for convenience, from focus on my life and just the people in it, to the wider world - worlds seen and unseen.    

Fromm says

“To be loved, and to love, need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern—and to take the jump and to stake everything on these values.”

And so I welcome inconvenience, I welcome the courage and patience it teaches me. The life-giving ‘inconvenience’ of the ever-changing hedgerows, and neighbourliness, and the Bible, and many other things help me to slow down and pay attention, they help me to know and to love, they help me to work on a world I may never see.  

Article
Attention
Creed
Education
Psychology
6 min read

We miss so much when we only see what we are looking for

Explaining why we don't see the unseen - with the help of a gorilla.
A blurred image of a blindfolded man.
Manuel Bonadeo on Unsplash.

In a thriving Pentecostal Church on an English city street, a room full of worshippers are singing, clapping, dancing and throwing their hands in the air. The preacher cries “Come, Holy Spirit!” and there are cries of “Amen!” and “Yes Lord!” One person has tears on their cheeks.  

A few doors down, a few dozen Anglicans also gather. Heads bent over their liturgy books, there is a hum of responses and an air of reverence. “Give us the joy of your saving help: and sustain us with your life-giving Spirit.” The altar candles flicker as the community settles itself into pews. The Holy Spirit is no less present to these worshippers, although they respond in a completely different way.  

Both churches share one creed, in which they commit to their belief in God as the source of all things, seen and unseen. Whilst Pentecostal theologies tend to focus on the observable and unpredictable signs of the Spirit at work, many Anglicans would describe the Spirit in terms of an inner experience, perhaps one that is cognitive rather than physical. But either way, Christians share one belief – that God is present in the world, and we call that the Holy Spirit.  

However, there are also hundreds of people who walk past both of these churches, week by week, who would never dream of setting foot inside. Many of them will think that anyone who believes in God is deluded or deceived. Such rationalist thinkers often have a strongly monist view of the world, in which everything, even mysterious things such as human consciousness and perception of non-physical entities, must have a physical or biological basis. As Ebenezer Scrooge says to the apparent ghost of Marley in Charles Dickens’ book, A Christmas Carol, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” 

It is almost impossible to convince someone who hasn’t had a first first-hand experience of God that anything like the Holy Spirit exists. Many nay-sayers, I suspect, quietly (or maybe not so quietly) believe that their unbelief is because they are more rational and maybe even more intelligent than those who get excited by such things. But there is another possible explanation for why some people apparently cannot, or will not, see the unseen.  

The British education system is heavily orientated towards STEM. Even when more creative subjects such as literature find their way into the syllabus, they are often studied in a rather dry and analytical way. Notwithstanding the efforts of the occasional maverick teacher, I recall much time spent learning how to identify the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare, and little (if any) time learning to articulate how his sonnets made me feel. Such a system turns out good scientists, but it may be that in doing so it trains our young people out of being able to perceive a whole raft of things which are arguably just as important to human flourishing.  

The world around us contains significantly more sensory input than our minds can process, so we simply don’t pay attention to most of it. 

A “selective attention test” can quickly prove this point. I did one recently with a room full of psychology undergraduates, almost all of whom had identified as monists. “Since you guys are the brightest and the best,” I simpered “let’s do a little intelligence test. Apparently only five per cent of the general population get the answer right to this puzzle, but in this room, I expect the success rate will be a little higher…”  

Having primed them by flattering their egos, I proceeded to show them a video called “The Monkey Business Illusion”, designed in 2009 by scientists Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. During the short film, a group of people pass basket balls to each other, and viewers are asked to count how many times the players wearing white shirts pass the ball. It seems simple enough, and when the film ended, I asked the students how many counted the right number of passes. Almost every hand in the room went up. No surprises there.  

Then I asked the more important question – who saw the gorilla? There was a smattering of laughter, and this time only about half of the hands went up. Meanwhile, the other half of my students were looking around at their peers, utterly confused… 

But it was true. In “The Monkey Business Illusion”, a person in a 6ft gorilla costume walks right across the middle of the scene, weaving through the players in the game. However, because most viewers are intently focussed on watching the players in white, they simply don’t perceive it. You can try this for yourself - the video I’m talking about can be found easily on YouTube, and if you follow the search term “selective attention test” there are many others like it.  

The material point is that the world around us contains significantly more sensory input than our minds can process, so we simply don’t pay attention to most of it. If you pause for a moment right now, you might notice that there is the hum of a heater in your room, or the noise of traffic outside, or the smell of an air freshener, or that a piece of your clothing that is too tight – things you were simply not aware of until I pointed them out. It’s common that we don’t perceive things until something else makes us think that they are important. If someone tells you that your house might have structural damage, you will suddenly start to notice every creak that comes from your walls and ceilings, even though those creaks have probably been happening for years.  

As social beings, we can be easily conditioned into paying attention to certain things and ignoring others. If I tell a group of students that intelligent people are highly attentive to the players in white shirts, I increase the likelihood that they simply will not notice a gorilla.  

There is good research to show that children, even in our modern and secular society, are inherently spiritual – most young kids believe in God, or gods, fairies and the existence of many things unseen. But this is not celebrated in our STEM focussed education system, wherein young minds are highly conditioned to let go of such “irrational” beliefs and trust in the full explanatory power of science. It is so effective that, by the time they get to my classroom at university, I’ve got little hope of persuading any of my monists that there was a 6ft gorilla without showing the video again and letting them see it for themselves.  

But there are always some people who are willing to challenge the idea that Marley was just an undigested bit of beef. There are always some people who attend churches of one type or another, or practice other forms of spirituality and religion. Some pray, some meditate, and many take part in rituals. This trains them in what anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann calls “micro-processes of attending”, leaving them more ready to perceive spiritual things instead of screening them out of their conscious awareness. How they respond might depend on preferred tradition – dancing, liturgy, or a little bit of both. But all agree that there is something going on that is unseen and important.  

Many STEM educated, highly rational and fully committed monists no doubt think that those who attend churches are deluded and deceived into perceiving unseen things are simply just not there. These nay-sayers have been taught, implicitly and explicitly, that it is more intelligent to believe in the all-explanatory power of science. But perhaps it is they who have been deluded and deceived? As the Monkey Business Illusion demonstrates, if you flatter someone’s intelligence enough, it becomes entirely possible to hide a 6ft gorilla in plain sight.  

Watch the Monkey Business Illusion

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