“Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.”
Jose Ortega y Gasset, Spanish Philosopher
My aging folks live in San Diego; I live on the outskirts of LA. I visit weekly now. Without traffic, it is a 2-hour freeway ride. I must confess that the stereotype of the So Cal driver obsessing about which freeway to choose is based in truth. I generally choose “the 15” (yes, for some reason we put the article “the” before our freeway names…) It is an inland freeway, cut through rolling hills.
One Sunday afternoon, we were making our way home. My sweetheart was driving and I was taking in the scenery.
The terrain of So Cal may be an acquired taste, but I find beauty here. Virtually treeless, often boulder strewn, the hills are fuzzy brown in the summer and, when we’ve had rain over a few successive days, soft emerald in the winter.
It was a cloudless winter day. The green hills shown below the bright blue sky. My heart opened as I took in the beauty. I felt the kind of reverence reserved for the glories of nature.
Then my eye traveled to the base of the hill, level with the freeway. White plastic bags caught in the scrubby grass along with other trash people had thoughtlessly dumped from their cars. My mood shifted and my heart shut. “Oh geez, how ugly is this? And who throws trash out their windows in this day and age?!?”
My eyes lifted: beauty. My eyes lowered: disgust.
Hmmm, interesting.
I’d been reading about a simple principle of brain function. Essentially, what we attend to grows. What we choose to notice looms large in our minds. This “noticing” produces thoughts. Those thoughts produce feelings. Those thoughts and feelings literally influence the kind of life we lead.
Well, here is a choice, I thought. I can notice the green hills against the blue sky, or I can notice the trash next to the road. I can feel expansive, or I can feel contracted.
The only reason to focus on the trash by the road is to work on a solution to stop it. Realistically, I am not going to do that today.
So I’d rather focus on the green hills. I’d rather revel in natural beauty. I’d rather have my heart open. I’d rather feel grateful to the universe. So that is just what I did. And it was completely my choice.
Let me ask you: What do you choose to attend to today?