Paying attention can be a gift of love

I have reached the chapter of elderhood in my life. It came quickly, surprised me (and still does), and comes with lessons. 

Lessons and answers

Love is the answer, the songs say. Love makes the world go around. Love will conquer all. Love is greater than hate. All these are beautiful thoughts with truth to them. At this age, I find I now slow down more to ask the definition of words. What does love look like? How does it show up? How will I recognize it? How can I best express it?

One answer that I keep coming back to is that love means paying attention. Love can mean stopping your own internal noise to see and hear what is going on around you, what is going on for someone else, what we need to see, hear, feel, respond to, acknowledge, and learn from. 

In conversations, I remind myself to stop figuring out what my next comment may be to focus instead on what someone else is saying, to try and hear their language, their music, their story. There is such richness there, such depth, such wonder, so much to hear and learn from. I can’t listen to music if I am always busy composing my own tunes. I can so easily miss what is going on around me…the colors, the tones, the nuances, the emotions, the very essence of life.

I take walks in the redwoods and listen to the trees and what their rustling leaves stir in me. I marvel at my tears. I listen to the song of the morning birds and am moved by the grace of their singing to the earth, to the universe, the song in them reaching my heart. I pay attention to an animal and get immediate rewards in their response to being seen right then. The connection becomes real and deep and the moment takes over from the past or future.

 The present asserts its power when acknowledged and lived in.

I listen to someone sharing their experience with me and am honored to be able to provide a moment of witness to their lives. What a gift that they are sharing with me. 

I listen to the questions of children and their innocence and awe as I volunteer at the zoo. Such genuine curiosity and wonder at what they are seeing brings a stop in my own never ending internal brain-noise.

I see the distraction of our electronic devices, which do have gifts to give us, but can take away our precious attention for long periods of time without our consciously having agreed to give that to them for that long. When I sit down to dinner with someone and they set their phone down on the table, I immediately feel that I will only get their attention until that device takes over, making me feel both rushed and less important somehow.

I listen to interactions between parents and their children. Do they know what a gift they are giving their children by really hearing them versus the generation with the motto children are to be seen and not heard. We are all still basically children wanting to be heard, to be noticed, to be treated as significant. 

When I ask how are you, I try to really listen to your answer. When someone says not so great, I ask for more details, more info, more sharing so that I can hear their struggle. When someone asks me and then stops to hear my answer, I am grateful and surprised, given all the distractions in our modern world. 

I may show you a photo that I took. What am I showing you? Do you ask me to tell you what this photo may have touched in me at that moment?

I sigh and say that today has been rough. Do you ask me more or say you know how that feels and go into your own description of your day, thinking that you are relating to me but not realizing that you took the attention away from my experience back to yours?

I write and get such delight when someone really takes the time to hear what I write, when something that I have written touches something in them, when they pay attention to the voice of my heart and soul. I also notice when there is judgment made without asking for more information, or when there is a need to take over the conversation with their own phrases and words, at the expense of hearing me.

Listening to ourselves

And another surprise I have found is how little I have paid deep enough attention to my own voice, my own self, my own soul at times. In the distraction of trying to attend to everything and everyone around me, I can get lost somehow in the process. Do I acknowledge my own pain? Am I gentle with myself or do I just keep pushing myself in a way that I would never do to someone else? Why would I, or any of us, deserve any less?

I am learning to slow down, to hear, to ask and then wait for an answer from deep within me. The realization, as an elder, of having less time ahead of me these days gives me the wisdom to know to slow down for each moment and truly live in it. 

We are all hungry to be seen and heard, to be acknowledged, to be understood. We can chase that desire with distraction, with speed, with volume, with demands, with anger, even with violence at times, rather than understanding that real power and attention happen in moments of quiet, in moments of listening, in moments of coming back into our own bodies and acknowledging what we see, hear, and feel around us. Life and love mean feeling each precious breath, each sigh of another, each note of our own symphony, each touch of grief, sadness, joy, connection, of love being expressed daily.

Paying attention requires presence, quietness, stillness, patience, trust that there is enough time, trust that there will be room enough for everyone, realization of the honor of being shared with, of being trusted with what that quietly lives inside us. 

I can tell you that I love you, which is beautiful. And I can slow down to hear you, see you, and show you my love by giving you the sacred gift of my attention, putting my love into action.