The Artwork of Paying Consideration
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“Consideration is the start of devotion,” the poet Mary Oliver wrote in her closing assortment of essays. In 2021, the poet Leila Chatti took up Oliver’s phrases, reflecting on the problem of them: “All day, the world makes its calls for. There’s a lot of it, world / begging to be observed.”
For these of us working to decelerate, to odor the roses, to look each other within the eyes slightly than within the iMessage bubbles, Oliver is an ideal information. As my colleague Franklin Foer wrote in 2019, “It was not Mary Oliver’s intent to critique this new world—and it’s onerous to think about she even owned a flip cellphone—however her poetry captures its non secular prices.”
The world makes its calls for, and distraction has each private prices and societal ones. My colleague Megan Garber has neatly famous how an overload of knowledge and a fracturing of consideration makes folks, and Individuals particularly, much less outfitted to fulfill the challenges of the second. “As we speak’s information strikes as a maelstrom [of] info without delay trifling and historic, petty and grave, cajoling, demanding, humorous, horrifying, uplifting, embarrassing, fleeting, loud—a lot of it, at so many scales,” she wrote in 2021.
A scarcity of consideration is harmful. However we would additionally spend time interested by the fantastic thing about its presence, what consideration offers again to those that pay it. I’ll go away you with a couple of extra of Oliver’s phrases: “When it’s over, I need to say: all my life / I used to be a bride married to amazement. / I used to be the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.”
On Consideration
“Consideration Is the Starting of Devotion”
By Franklin Foer
The late poet Mary Oliver warned towards wanting with out noticing. In an age of distraction, her work is extra pressing than ever.
The Nice Fracturing of American Consideration
By Megan Garber
Why resisting distraction is among the foundational challenges of this second
Mister Rogers and the Artwork of Paying Consideration
By Adelia Moore
The beloved kids’s-show host knew what was on the coronary heart of human relationships.
Nonetheless Curious?
- “Moccasin Flowers”: Oliver celebrates the attractive fervor of life within the face of oblivion with characteristically easy and poignant verse.
- The struggle for consideration: We might dwell in an endlessly distracted world, however the place we focus our gaze nonetheless issues.
Different Diversions
P.S.
When you’re concerned about studying one other poet whose work focuses on consideration to the main points of our lives and the way we share these particulars with others, decide up one thing by Maggie Smith. I like to recommend her poem “First Fall.”
— Isabel
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