Focus or notice?

Photo credit: Ron Stewart

A very busy rabbit in Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland doesn’t have time to say hello or goodbye because he’s late, he’s late, he’s late. This is just one of the classic ideas from that movie that lodges in our mind for years. Americans are notoriously busy, fast talking, in a hurry, frantic about the long list of things to do while diminishing available time slips away.

Writers are subject also to the tyranny of schedule. Focus is often offered as the elixir. We must not permit interruptions. Turn off notifications! Push “Do Not Disturb” on email. Allocate a certain time for reading, a separate hour for research, another for writing. Set a daily word goal! The idle man is the miserable man, as Benjamin Franklin lectured. We’re late, we’re late, we’re late.

Yes, but focus can be the bane of notice. A friend once suggested that watching birds would help me adjust to a new place I had chosen to live. Nothing to do, I said. You live in the Missouri Flyway, he replied. The what? You live in a place with one of the most amazing assortment of birds flitting north in spring and south in fall. Some hang around all winter. All you have to do is notice them.

Noticing is to writers as produce is to a cook. Both need material. Fresh peas in spring make a wonderful seasonal pasta, and the footfall on carpet becomes a metaphor for existence. Virginia Woolf noticed moths and wrote a classic poem on its life and struggle toward death. John Steinbeck watched a turtle cross the highway and began his magnum opus with the image.

Moments alone or moments with aging friends or moments with a child at a pond can seem unproductive, but they can also be rich with possibility. To discover material for a poem, a novel, a composition, a work of visual art is an exercise in observation. Stop and smell the roses, etc etc. For a writer, or the person who wants meaning in life, noticing is not idleness.

—RJ Stewart