There are two ways to pay attention, yet in our culture we have been taught really only one.
The first type is directed attention. It focuses on one thing, needs effort, and leads to tunnel vision.
We look ahead, we focus, and the rest of the world is pushed to the edges. It’s the kind of attention you use to read a report, follow an argument, or search for something you’ve lost. It also tires you easily.
Use it long enough and the quality of everything you do begins to drop because it demands an awful lot of energy. The attention muscle, as psychologists call it, easily fatigues.
The second kind is known as soft fascination. Named by psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan, this is the attention you pay to a fire, moving clouds, or light changing on a wall.
It’s unhurried and unfocused, yet you remain present with what you are observing. Your focus is open rather than aimed.
When you go to connect with a plant, the temptation is to direct your focus, to bear down and look hard.
In Domei we shift into a different kind of attention. Directed, wilful attention has its place. It produces observable data of the facts-and-figures kind, which matter in certain contexts.
But directed attention excludes encounter. You’re collecting data. Does the plant have opposite leaves or square stems? This type of attention has its place and is of great importance, yet it does not facilitate a meeting of the plant.
What Domei calls for is soft attention, as the Kaplans call it.
It’s a different way to approach the living world. Rather than grasping for detail, we empty out and let the detail come to us, emerge.
It’s a bit like those old 3D pictures. At first glance, they look like a mass of squiggles. Direct your focus and the picture stays flat. But soften your gaze, keeping it loose and open, and the picture pops out as three-dimensional. What appeared to be a mess shows its form.
Soft focusing is a deliberate, attentive gaze. Alert but not tense. Not bearing down on the plant with a furrowed forehead. Not passive but open in a way that directed attention is not.
I’ve found that the natural world doesn’t show itself when we focus too hard. But with soft-focused attention, new possibilities emerge.