Life Kit - How to pay attention to (and appreciate) what's around you

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

When you're in a familiar place, it's easy to go on autopilot and fail to notice the small joys that surround you. Artist and author Jenny Odell shares tips on how to pay attention to and appreciate what's right in front of you.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This is NPR's Life Kit. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The thaw has arrived, at least here in Baltimore, where I am at the time of this taping. The days are getting longer, the cold is subsiding, and we are fast approaching that perfect date weather, that Miss Congeniality weather, you know, when it's not too hot, not too cold, which is to say it is the perfect time to get outside and see something new. And you don't have to go far. Today's episode is all about how to pay attention to your usual surroundings with some fresh eyes. We have a natural curiosity.

And it's just, you know, unfortunate that the structures of life and, you know, many different factors kind of cover over that. And you have to find ways of rehabilitating it. That's Jenny Odell, previous guest of the pod, avid birdwatcher and author of the book How to Do Nothing. In this episode of Life Kit, she's going to be our guide the stuff that's around you. You know, that park down the street. That weird-looking building a few blocks from work. That bench underneath that tree where you ate a sandwich once. Really paying attention to these things is probably

something you only do when a friend visits from out of town and you play tourist in your own town with them. But it's important to try and incorporate that energy into your everyday life. It is, after all, the ecosystem you inhabit. Just like those dioramas in science class, everything in an ecosystem affects everything else, including you. Here's Odell reading from her book, How to Do Nothing. It's a bit like falling in love, that terrifying realization that your fate is linked to someone else's, that you are no longer your own. But isn't that closer to the truth anyway? Our fates are linked to each other, to the places where we are,

and everyone and everything that lives in them. How much more real my responsibility feels when I think about it this way. This is more than just an abstract understanding that our survival is threatened by global warming or even a cerebral appreciation for other living beings and systems. Instead, this is an urgent personal recognition that my emotional and physical survival are bound up with these quote strangers, not just now, but for life. It's just like, you know, every, every, I don don't know every guy hits 30 and all of a sudden like gets like uh into the the city planning youtube rabbit hole and like that's in my bag and i've sort of been thinking a lot about like oh everything everything all of our decisions are intricately yeah i'm sure it's like oh where you put a street affects uh all this other stuff you

know and i'm just like oh man so reading the book has like made me think a lot about that sort of stuff. I'm just curious, what do you think, what do you get out of acting like a tourist in your own town? I've always been amazed by how much we take for granted, even if you haven't lived somewhere that long or aren't that familiar or don't think you're that familiar. There's so much that we write off and that familiar or don't think you're that familiar. There's so much that we write off. And that could be, you know, architectural, it could be environmental, it could

be things that happen, things that people are doing. I think, you know, if you think about like the route that you take to commute, for example, there's so much that just kind of doesn't come to your attention because you sort of either think that you know it already or there's no reason for you to pay attention to it. And then it's sort of funny because then when you go to another place as a tourist, you notice everything because you're in a sort of tourist mindset. Whereas like people who live there have probably written off many of those things. So it's really just a perspective, I think, that is one where you pay attention to maybe different kinds of things, maybe a different kind of level of granularity. I think you're less susceptible to think of things as like banal or everyday, if you're in a Taurus mindset. And so I think that's, for me, that's the main thing.

It's always surprising, like you'll always find something, you know, surprising and oftentimes delightful when you're in that mindset. Yeah. Like you take the time to read the little, like, some guy built I and many people I know have been walking a lot and walking in neighborhoods, is to walk around a week later was like, I really want to show you this weird thing that I found in a mural. And I've walked past this mural like hundreds and hundreds of times. And I never would have noticed that thing. And so like, it just really goes to show that what you see has to do with like what you specifically are looking for or aren't looking for. And so I think just like going somewhere with someone else or like going on a walking tour, historical walking tour of your own neighborhood, if you're so lucky to be able to do that, those can be really eye-opening experiences. And, you know, besides having someone else

accompany you around your neighborhood, what other ways do you think that like people can really dig into like their whereabouts? Like how do they reopen their eyes so to speak um i think one really easy way is to think about the idea of like a lens and you can take that literally or figuratively so literally um i i tend to walk around with um i don't know i've seen it referred to as a jeweler's loop i don't know about a lot about these lenses but basically i have a very small magnifying glass like type thing that and it's like a 10x lens but um i've used that to look at you know plants really close up and it's it's actually a little bit comical because in my experience,

you have to be quite close to the thing that you're looking at. And your eye also has to be pretty close to the lens. So I look like some kind of weird plant detective, because I'm like, walking up to these plants with this like, tiny, you know, my face sort of pressed up against this thing and like, really close to some leaves or whatnot but um i am always surprised by how things look i mean plants are so much hairier than you realize um and like insects are terrifying but and like there's like dew drops and all these kind of tiny details it's like very magical to realize that there's this you know world it's very like honey honey i shrunk the kids like level of of wonder so i carry that around and then i also often have binoculars on me because i'm a birder so i have you know my own

eyes which see in a certain way and then i have this lens where i can see things that are really small and then i have this other lens where i can see things that are far away and so like that's a that's sort of a literal example of lenses. But I think you can also think about conceptual lenses, like what are you looking for? So what if you walked through your neighborhood and you tried to pay attention to things that are flowering? I mean, this is a good time to be doing that because it's the spring.

And maybe over the course of weeks or months, you continue to pay attention to those plants and you kind of track them through their flowering processes. Or maybe you try to pay attention to what kinds of insects are attending to them. You could do a really interesting thing just only paying attention to sound or only certain types of sound. But all of these kind of involve a decision to begin with. I am going to pay attention to X, and that's my lens, and I'm going to move through the space. And I think that that's, I mean, there's almost an infinite number of things that you could choose.

And so there's an infinite number of interpretations that you could have of the same space. And I think that's been something that I've really relied on during the pandemic, especially because, you know, we're all looking for novelty. And that is sort of a movement that you can make in your own head before you're even in the space that will drastically affect what you're going to notice. How do you how do you decide what to to fix your lens on or which lens to choose? Yeah, I think it sort of just depends on what you are maybe naturally curious about. So, you know, for me, I personally just am drawn to

ecological processes, but there's also this layer of history that is in everything as well. So, you know, I remember at some point years ago, I was, I think I looked up, I live in an apartment building, but there's a house across the street that I looked up and it was built in the 1920s. And I remember that just kind of set off this whole thing for me of like, oh, this, that side of the street that those were all built in the 1920s. Like, I wonder why, like, why were they built like that um so i think there's also kind of like an architectural historical layer that you could pay attention to like you know styles of things but just thinking about yeah like why why things are in the places that they are um you know another way of putting it is it's just like during the

pandemic i remember i would walk around and just ask myself like what is different from yesterday um and then like the that's kind of a funny question because you realize that actually everything is different from yesterday but asking that question will maybe like allow you to find the things that are most obviously different from yesterday and that could be things things that people are doing in the space you know things that are growing or blooming things that are being built or torn down birds that have arrived you know that weren't there before smells I know there's someone who gives like smell tours in New York City or did at some point so really like anything that's in your sort of powers of observation,

like using that to try to measure the difference of today from yesterday. Bro, I'm not going on that smell tour. I mean, this question might sound a little ridiculous, but how do you pay attention? I mean, I think there are many ways to pay attention. I think for me, one of the things that I have noticed, I think especially in the last couple of years, about the way that I pay attention is that it has a lot to do with time and being attentive to change. So, for example, I know, sorry, all my examples are from birding. But like, if when you when you start birding, right, you get your bird

guide, and you have all these different birds in it. And you could sort of treat it like Pokemon Go, right? Like, I'm looking for this bird, I saw it, I saw the bird, I'm done. Like, I keep walking, right? And then inevitably, I think, especially if you're in the same place, and you're paying attention to the same birds, you start to notice things like, oh, you know, these birds do different things at different times of the year, then you realize, oh, they do different types of things during different times of the day. And at some point, I think when that moves from just like that bird is there to like that bird is observing and responding to its environment, I find that like if I observe that, that's the deepest form of attention that I'm aware of,

is if I am attending to, you know, like, let's say this bird attending to its environment, which really just means like tracking something through space and also, both through space and time, and acknowledging that it is also alive to its environment. So conversely, the best, the easiest way to not pay attention to something is to think that it's just kind of a frozen object in space, like it's not going to change um it doesn't have an orientation to time um and that's how you write things off it's like i've seen it i'm done and then you're no longer paying attention to it and i think if you really want to pay attention to something for more than a moment it has to come with the acknowledgement that you know that thing or being has a history and it also has a future and it's it's sort of existing in time with you and it's changing

do you have any advice on how to build a community out of this sort of stuff like maybe from scratch and like start you know spreading the good news of looking around and noticing things yeah i mean i think the first step would just be having to find out if someone's already done that you know, spreading the good news of looking around and noticing things? Yeah, I mean, I think the first step would just be having to find out if someone's already done that, which, you know, if you're lucky, maybe someone already has. I don't have a lot of great examples. I mean, well, so I guess, you know know under the category of things that are already established you know um here in the bay area the golden gate audubon society organizes trips you know birding trips which um and i also mentioned earlier the feminist birding club um so there are you know birding is the type of thing that's like it's an established enough thing that there are often like groups that already exist that you could maybe look for

um but i also i'm almost more drawn to um like smaller things where i'm just thinking of i have one friend in particular who's like my my birding friend like this is the friend that i will text if i see um you know a bird for the first time uh with like many exclamation points because it's like the one of the only people I know who will like understand why that's so exciting um on a personal level we walk around and look at birds and that's that's I don't know if that counts as a group that's two people but I I do feel like you sometimes only need one other person um to sort of make that agreement with like we're going to pay attention to x and then you go and look for it um because it's about sharing that experience um so and then who's to say that you know you and your friend don't find like another person

that you just know sort of through friends or whatever who also likes that thing so maybe the three of you go you know what i mean that's kind of a more organic approach um versus the kind of like organized walk which the organized walks are really great, too, because they're, you know, they're often led by an expert. So like you can just ask the person, like, what is that? And they'll tell you. But I think that those are kind of two different approaches to kind of like finding others. You mentioned taking the bus before. There's a passage in the book about public transportation and sort of like what it offers. And I was wondering if you could like tell me a little bit more about like, what do you get out of taking the bus or the train as opposed to just like driving somewhere? Yeah, that's funny you ask. I was just on the bus

in again in San Francisco last week, and I was thinking about how much I love the bus. But I think it's that it's one of the last places but there's generally like a sense of like respect and like mutual recognition. Like we all just want this opportunity to consider like the reality of other people who I don't have some kind of um it's not you know friends or family or someone that I have some kind of like obvious relationship to and you just kind of see people getting on and off it's just this kind of like indication I think of like other lives and um and I find that that again especially during the pandemic I, I find that that, again, especially during the pandemic, I felt I really missed that. I think like the world kind of shrank in this way that it made it hard, harder to just like really in a palpable way, like sit with the fact of, of like, just everyone kind of trying

to make it right. Like everyone's just trying to get through their lives and um people have like hopes and desires and dreams and regrets and and every single person you see on the bus has those you know and like i you know you can get that sort of from walking around if you're in a crowded area but i don't know to me there's something about the bus where you're where you're all going into in the same direction and you're all kind of invested in in the bus like getting there uh and um and you're just and you're sitting together you know even if you're not talking so um in short i love the bus no buses rock and yeah i love yeah the i never feel like more part of the city than like, if somebody's

like being a piece of shit and everybody on the bus is like booing them. Yeah, right, right. Like, totally. And that's what I was gonna say. I know there's all, you know, like, there's always, you know, not always, but there's going to be, you know, oftentimes some kind of incident on the bus. And it's like, but there are also then all the other people on the bus who are going to like rally around, like trying to make sure that everything is okay.

So, and I think that that's maybe, maybe that's part of it for me too, is like, there's some kind of illusion of individuality, like a model of individuality where you can sort of live your life unaffected by others and not affecting others that is perpetuated by something like driving a car on a freeway versus like when you're on a bus, you are confronted with this reality that you are, your life is intimately bound up with the lives of others, especially those who you do not, are not friends and family, who you don't have some sort of personal relationship to. And like the bus just kind of models that or just kind of reminds you of that general truth. For more Life Kit, check out our other episodes. We've got one on practicing mindfulness, another on birding, plus lots more at npr.org slash life kit.

And if you love Life Kit and want more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash life kit. And if you love life kit and want more, subscribe to our newsletter at npr.org slash life kit newsletter. And now a completely random tip. Hello, Life Kit. My name is Aroob Abdul-Hameed. And my tip for you is to restart your computer once a week. This does not include sleep mode. You have to restart it. It gets rid of a lot of the stuff that just builds up over the week and makes your computer run a lot more smoothly. Thanks and have to restart it. It gets rid of a lot of the stuff that just builds up over the week and makes your computer run a lot more smoothly. Thanks and have a great one. If you've got a good tip, leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823 or email us a voice memo at lifekit at npr.org. This episode of LifeKit was produced by Andy Tegel. Megan Cain is the managing producer.

Beth Donovan is the senior editor. Our production team also includes Audrey Nguyen, Claire Marie Schneider, Sylvie Douglas, and Janet Woo Jung Lee. Our digital and visuals editor is Beck Harlan. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Thanks for listening.