On Replenishing Attention
Lying down to get back up
Hello friends.
I’m so sick of everything falling apart.
By sick of I don’t mean “I have broadly negative feelings about it.” I do, of course.
I mean I’m actually bored by it. In this moment. The fascist takeover layered on top of a climate crisis, a genocidal war in Gaza, a grinding war in Ukraine, and everything, everything else. This is getting boring. Predictably terrible, repetitive and so, so exhausting.
The first few months of 2025, after the inauguration, I was surfing waves of adrenaline. I was motivated, full of energy and purpose. That is starting to leak away now.
My problem is, the people destroying our democracy, attacking science, progress, and vulnerable people everywhere, ripping holes in our already-tattered social safety net are just so tacky! They’re so stupid. There is nothing new left to say about them. The crypto schemes. The white elephant Qatari airplane. The ancient racism. The Barbie doll trade war!! So venal. So trivial. These people were boring in the 80s!
I hate to feel this way, because interest and curiosity are what fuel me, as a writer and as a person.
And I hate to feel this way, because I know in some ways we are at the very beginning of this.
I was at a party over the weekend talking to someone who said they were fully tuned out and spiritually hunkered down, hoping to conserve their energy for “after this is over.” I said, I have news for you, if we don’t have a maximum-turnout, Erica Chenoweth 3.5% uprising this summer, and into the midterms, this decline could easily keep unfolding for 20 years or more. It doesn’t end unless we stand up and end it.
But while I was frustrated by the conversation, on reflection, there was wisdom in my friend’s attitude. There’s a happy medium between ignoring and bathing in the firehose. I don’t want to get complacent, but I desperately needed to refill my cup.
On Sunday, my family gave that to me.
For Mother’s Day, I requested a day trip to Dia: Beacon, a contemporary art museum located in a former Nabisco factory on the Hudson River.
I had been there only once, with my college roommates, right after it opened in 2003. As I recall, we ate some special brownies that had us hiding, giggling, from the guards.
Without enhancements, the site-specific installations still worked their magic. Michael Heizer’s apparently bottomless pits, both witty and menacing. Richard Serra’s rusted steel labyrinths, where we improvised a call and response of resonant tones.
We saved the lower level for last. It’s a 30,000-square-foot, time-burnished concrete space with a high ceiling and widely spaced curved pillars. It looks monumental, like Istanbul’s Cisterna Basilica. It contained an installation by Steve McQueen, the British artist and filmmaker, called Bass.
A glowing grid of 60 square panels was set into the ceiling. A slow, low soundtrack, all bass, was composed for the occasion by artists including Meshell Ndegeocello. Color and sound, paired, thickened the space. “It was loud, but also calming,” my 8 year old said.
Our first response—not just the four of us, but for many I observed—was to move in slow motion, cantilevering our limbs far out from our centers.
Most people got across the room bathed in just one hue. But our tai-chi like group improvisation held us there for several minutes. It was long enough to see and feel violet shifting toward blue at the speed of twilight. My oldest, a gifted artist, cottoned on. And asked, “Can we stay all the way through?”
There was a little piece of me that panicked then. The piece of me whose attention span is trashed by my phone and my years covering breaking news. And by parenting itself. For so many years you’re living on the clock, beholden, ticking down, to the next feeding, next nap. Keeping kids engaged in an experience like an art museum, especially, often means moving at a brisk pace.
But here was my big kid asking to stick it out. And that had the little one eager to as well. We were in it to win it. Backwards around the rainbow.
So we exhaled and swayed, from teal through green and into yellow. We lay on the floor in corpse pose at dead center of the room as the color drained from our lips. Then warmed gradually up to coral, and our skin looked alive again. Then hardly, hardly, through the manufactured dawn, all the shades of volcano and lipstick and vermilion and carnelian and magenta and fuschia and back around again, slowly, slowly, to violet.
No phones allowed. Time opened up. We had nothing to do for those untold minutes but be, and breathe, and prolong the moment together.
This was not the sere discipline of mindfulness meditation, all alone with your thoughts and sensations. Nor the sensory frenetics of a concert, a painting gallery or even a garden in full bloom. There was a harmony of space, height, color, and tone, massaging our senses. I felt my attention gently clasped, loosely held, ready to be returned to me and directed as I choose.
We walked out into the sunlight as new people.
Some links
I’ve been writing a lot! I published a piece in National Geographic about post-traumatic growth, one of my favorite topics.
Studies have consistently found that on average, between half and two-thirds of survivors report positive changes and a new life outlook after a tragedy or crisis.
Resilience can be defined broadly as “bouncing back” from adversity, returning to how you were before the hardship struck. When people experience post-traumatic growth, by contrast, they identify improvements in their lives.
Recently, researchers have been finding brain structures that correlate with this kind of growth. And they’ve been unearthing new social and community factors and personal behaviors that contribute to fostering it....
Growth can also come from putting one’s struggles in a broader historical and cultural context. Émilie Ellis at the University of Georgia has studied post-traumatic growth in queer women and nonbinary people. They went through Ellis calls “political healing” as they realized their experiences were similar to so many others across the world and throughout history. “So many people talked about how it helped… to learn ‘I wasn’t the only one who’d gone through this,’” Ellis says.
And I published an uplifting piece in New York about the battle for trans student rights.
“Trans justice is impossible without also doing racial, disability, and immigrant justice. It’s all one thing.”
"“It’s nice in times when it feels like everything is bad to be a part of something that actually feels like we’re making progress locally...I am so grateful for this partnership that we’re building. Don’t fuck with Alaina Daniels, and don’t fuck with trans kids.”
This sounds like such an experience! Thank you for sharing it. I loved the post traumatic growth article. And happy (belated) Mother’s Day!
I really resonated with this piece. I too have been so bored with the stupidity and brutality. I would love to read the piece you write for Nat Geo on post traumatic growth, but it requires a subscription. Any way you can share it as a "gift" link or in another format? Thank you!