I've given my notice at the accounting firm where I've worked for nearly four years. The owner is an incredible woman who built and has held a company in service to her community for 35 years. No small part of this feat is the group of women she's gathered as her staff and her staunch friends - I've rarely seen such a group of women. All strong, intelligent, confident, opinionated women who somehow manage to treat each other with respect day after sometimes brutally stressful day. I grew to know them and the individual clients of my small community very well over the last few years and am deeply grateful for the honor of becoming their friend. I've enjoyed the work, honing my craft to make numbers tell a story that real people can find sense in. The job provided my family a wonderful stability from which to explore our world and our selves. Yet, my farmer's heart beat against the office windows like a moth against the glass.
So, with a bit of sadness, a lot of anxiety, and a roomful of hope and belief in myself, I stepped back into the unknown. And who do you think I found there? The rest of my family! Zoe, quite sentimental after attending graduation ceremonies for some of her best friends, is in her last year of school before full enrollment in college. Rae will walk in her own promotion to high school in just a couple weeks. And Jeff had a wonderfully successful debut of his Pastured Poultry at one of our local Farmers' Markets.
For each of us, it's a time when all of our resources, our strengths, our challenges, our hopes for ourselves and each other seem to be sitting at the dinner table, walking through the house, waiting for us in the car. Because clear next steps have yet to crystallize for any of us, none of these possibilities can be discarded. How can we make sure we are giving our attention to the right elements? How can we watch everything closely enough so that we don't miss our big chance? Duke University professor and author Cathy N. Davidson has written a fabulous book Now You See It which offers answers to questions about attention just like these. She states,
Because of the categories by which we bundle our world, we can see efficiently. But those same categories make us miss everything else, {an infant's] job is to mimic and to master his culture's categories, long before he has the words to describe them and long before he's developed sophisticated sociological terms to explain them away...[This] is the process we all go through as human beings. This process teaches our brain to pay attention, which means it is how our brain learns not to pay attention to the things that aren't considered important to those around us.
But those other things do exist, all the time, even if we are not noticing them. That is simply how the brain science of attention works, with the world around us focusing our attention on what counts. What we are counting makes the things that don't count invisible to us. As adults, we are not as helpless as [infants] anymore. We have the power to make choices. When confronted with the new - with what seems odd or outrageous, annoying or nonsensical - we can deny it has any value. We can label it a worthless distraction. Or we can try, on or own or with the help of others, to redraw our maps to account for the new. We can actually use the new to reshape how we focus our attention. We have the capacity to learn, which is to say we have the capacity to change. We were born with that capacity.
