In her memoir Will and Attention, Meghan O’Gieblyn reminds us that exhortations to listen more, engage more fully with the world, and pay closer attention to what is happening around us are easier said than done. Part of the struggle comes from the tension between the voices inside our heads and the voices in the outside world. When the internal voices become loud enough, they drown out everything else, making genuine attention nearly impossible. Nor are these thoughts necessarily useful or interesting. O’Gieblyn describes her own as “circular, deterministic, and relentlessly self-excoriating.”
That last word, with its suggestion of self-laceration, reminded me of something writer Ana Marie Cox once said on her now-defunct podcast. Just as she had been addicted to alcohol, she suffered from another addiction: self-hatred. Her therapist warned her not to pick up the liquor bottle of self-loathing and drink from it. Yet she would lift this metaphorical bottle to her lips as compulsively as an alcoholic sipping vodka. Once such a habit becomes deeply entrenched, paying attention to it becomes extraordinarily difficult because the behavior feels almost as involuntary as breathing.
As O’Gieblyn struggles to follow Simone Weil’s advice to abandon the will and replace it with attention, she learns that she must engage with the world “without the distorting lens of the ego.” She must confront what William James called the “sick soul,” the soul divided against itself. We cannot simply will these divided selves into wholeness. In the tradition of the great religions, wholeness often requires surrender to a power greater than ourselves. But O’Gieblyn no longer finds the tenets of religion useful to her, nor even the more universal spiritual tenets of AA. “Letting go” too often returns her to the original problem: the egotistical self doing the letting go.
Rather than seek surrender in the traditional religious sense, O’Gieblyn turns toward the kind of surrender Simone Weil associates with attention. Attention is not merely focus. It involves what Weil calls the “indirect method,” an idea she never explicitly defines. We can infer, however, that the indirect method requires us to approach a problem with calm and patience rather than demand immediate results. We engage with our problems from different angles, remain attentive to what they reveal, and hope to plant seeds that eventually bear fruit.
But this approach presents a maddening problem. It requires maturity, and maturity may be the very state we are trying to attain. If we need maturity to approach life’s challenges with patient attention, we arrive at a bootstrapping paradox: We need the capacity we are trying to develop in order to develop that capacity.
We all need maturity, poise, and wholeness, but the patience required to travel that path may be precisely what the immature person lacks. A patient person is therefore better equipped to practice Weil’s indirect method and bear fruit. An impatient person may become frustrated, abandon the endeavor, and regress into deeper forms of infantilization and addiction. Thus, he who has, more shall be given; he who has not, more shall be taken away. This is the psychological Matthew Effect: maturity creates conditions for greater maturity, while immaturity can create conditions for deeper immaturity. The rich get richer not merely in money but in psychological resources.
As I reach retirement age, I find myself caught inside this very problem. I am trying to live as long as possible so I can collect as many monthly retirement checks as possible, turning myself into a commodity in the name of gaming the system on the metaphorical game show I call Beat the Actuary. Intellectually, I know this is spiritual madness, but I cannot simply will the impulse away. Nor do I appear to possess the patience necessary to attend to it in the calm and mature manner Simone Weil describes.
Fortunately, I remain genuinely amused by the comic absurdity of my predicament. Without that amusement, I might tumble into despair. But despair eludes me for now. I am content to read Meghan O’Gieblyn’s meditations on will and attention and hope that, by the time I finish her book, I will have become a slightly better man.
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