Maria Popova at The Marginalian:
Nothing magnifies life — in the proper sense of the word, rooted in the Latin for “to make greater, to glorify” — more than the act of noticing its details, and nothing sanctifies it more: Kneeling to look at a lichen is a devotional act. We bless our own lives by recognizing and reverencing the details, the miniature marvels that make this improbable world what it is. And yet consciousness evolved to filter them out, to blur them into more abstract pictures we can parse, to sieves relevance from reality in order to save us from being too wonder-smitten by the flickering morning light on the edge of the kitchen sink and the iridescent eye of the house fly to move through our days. Cognitive scientists know this necessary ailment of consciousness: “Right now, you are missing the vast majority of what is happening around you,” Alexandra Horowitz wrote in one of my favorite books, examining the “intentional, unapologetic discriminator” that is attention. Poets know the remedy: “Attention without feeling,” Mary Oliver wrote, “is only a report.”
Paying conscious attention, then, is our primary instrument of loving the world, abiding by Iris Murdoch’s splendid definition of love as “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” But because nothing abstract is real except mathematics, because love is made of the particular and the specific, to love anything — a person, a planet, your life — is at bottom a practice of noticing, which is always a devotional practice.
more here.
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