May 18, 2024
Graduates, President Dumay, members of the Board of Trustees, faculty, staff, honored guests, and beloved family members, it is a pleasure and an honor to share this day with you.
In the 47 seconds it took me to walk up to the podium and offer those opening words, I’ve already lost your attention. 47 seconds is a general estimate of the attention span for adults in America—down from more than two and a half minutes in 2005. And that’s just the average. Many people are clocking in with attention spans as low as 8.2 seconds. Our ability to concentrate has dropped precipitously over the past decade, and scientists believe it will continue to drop. We flit between our phone and our iPad and our laptop. We have conversations interrupted by pings and beeps. Our bodies are here, but our minds are jumping and wandering.
We know this is not good. We know this isn’t even satisfying. But we don’t know how to stop. We don’t even know if we want to stop.
Attention has fascinated me since I was a little girl. I have what we would now diagnose as ADHD—an attention deficit disorder. We didn’t use that term when I was growing up—especially not for a girl like me who was smart and “a pleasure to have in class.” I just knew that I was messy, disorganized, jumpy, and impatient. I envied the girls in my class with perfect handwriting (I swear that used to be a thing….) and the concentration to memorize multiplication tables (also, a thing…). I didn’t know that some people had only a single voice in their own heads and that the chorus inside mine—the fourteen simultaneous conversations going on at once—was anything unusual.
Over the years though, I learned to make this busy mind my own. I found that I could concentrate better if I was moving. I developed strategies for coping with my need for constant mental stimulation. I found work that aligned with the ability to think fast and jump between activities. I drank tea. Practiced yoga. Spent time on the analytic couch. All the introspection helped me understand the workings of my mind and observe its vicissitudes.
Oddly, as I grew better and better able to manage my focus, everyone around me grew more hyperactive. I point to October 27, 1996, as the inauguration of a great cultural change. That is the date in history in which MTV introduced pop up bubbles to its videos. Instead of just watching the videos and listening to the pop song, we were now also supposed to be reading ironic commentary and having side conversations with ourselves. From there we added 24-hour cable news and its ubiquitous rolling scrolls, and of course ultimately the web enabled smart phone (or as we call it now, a “phone”). I am no longer isolated in my ADHD. I was just ahead of the curve.
We are all hyperactive now. You might even be scrolling as I speak. Checking and pinging and unable to sit still with your own thoughts. I get it.
My graduation prayer for you is that you will learn to harness your own attention. I wish this for you because as I look at my life, the greatest joys, the deepest meaning, and the things that ultimately make me love my life, have all come from attending to them.
Focusing for a long-time span on a single thing allows for understanding—the close attention of letting one idea or object take you deep. Writing well takes this kind of discipline. So does painting, yoga, advanced study, and scientific observation. When we pay attention to something specific over time, we start to see patterns and layers. Discovery—whether of the movement of the galaxy, the behavior of locusts, or the meaning of a novel—begins with careful, patient observation over time.
My mind moves fast, and I relish the blinding “aha” of immediate insight. But I have learned that insight is much more likely to arise when I have first invested time in close reading and deep thought.
Even religious revelation requires ongoing attention. In my tradition, the Rabbis encourage us to think about how long Moses must have looked at that fiery bush to recognize that it was not being consumed. You can’t notice that in an instantaneous glance. Or even in a glance of 8.2 seconds. It takes time to observe the behavior of the flame and the wood. If Moses had a smart phone in his pocket, he might never have encountered G-d.
There is a second form of attention that is equally important for a life well lived. This one is less about having a single uninterrupted focus and more about returning again and again to something that matters to you. Our deepest relationships and passions require this kind of attention. I call it “orbiting attention” because I picture myself as a planet orbiting around the sun of my husband, my children, my religious practices, and the big philosophical questions that continue to engage me. In this kind of attending, we see from a constantly changing and evolving perspective. We may not stare or lock in our minds, but we come to understand someone or something very deeply as we orient our life around its patterns. We move away but we always return. We offer attention over months and years and a lifetime.
Finding your sun means putting a stop to swiping and looking around for the next thing. It means re-orienting your sense of identity to include something bigger than yourself. It requires commitment. And it repays itself in ways impossible to imagine before you take that leap into orbit.
You might have noticed that I tend to talk about harnessing or offering attention rather than paying attention. Because as members of the “attention economy,” we are now literally asked to pay attention. That is, we proffer our attention, our eyeballs, to screens in exchange for a hit of dopamine and the chance to escape the discomfort of consciousness. The attention we pay is exchanged for money by the owners of the various apps who sell it to advertisers and managers of big data.
What happens if we stop paying or at least pay less of our attention for others and harness more of it for ourselves? What happens if we detox from the dopamine hit of the next digital spectacle and retain our attention for the things that we really care about? Owning our attention, using it on behalf of what we truly value, is an act of freedom. It may be our most important one. It’s also a form of resistance to much of what ails our society.
Taking back your own attention is not as easy as turning off your phone. (And let’s face it, even that seems really hard). While modern technology preys on our eagerness to avoid mental stillness, it didn’t create the disquiet that pushes us out of our thoughts and into a numbing alternative. The problem of the anxious, dissatisfied human mind is an ancient one. Most of the great human wisdom traditions—and here I would include philosophy, world religions, and psychoanalysis—all agree that a certain internal dissatisfaction is an inevitable part of being human. The very qualities that make us most distinctive and different than the rest of the animal kingdom also make us not quite at home in the world.
Whether you call this division within ourselves the unconscious, alienation, subjectivity, or craving, there is a pretty widespread agreement that we spend a lot of our lives feeling uncomfortable and dissatisfied. You probably recognize that persistent nagging feeling of wishing you were somewhere else or someone else. Right now, aren’t you thinking a little about “when will this ceremony be over?” And when it is over you will be thinking about how long it will take to drive home. And at home you will be regretting something you said at the reception and so forth and so forth. If only you had the right car, or the next thing, or lost five more pounds, or found the right outfit or the perfect job—then you would feel satisfied. Except you never do.
The divided, dissatisfied self is our human condition. Modern social media and digital noise take advantage of our vulnerability to existential distraction, but they don’t create it. We can try to run away from our existential itchiness by scrolling or shopping. But those actions only exacerbate the disappointment and put us on the hamster wheel of chasing the next hit of dopamine. Bummer.
The picture I am painting of a subject forever divided from itself may seem bleak. But there is another, more positive, side to it that is even more important than the discomfort it causes us.
Our dissonance, distance, separation, alienation—those very discomforts—are also the source of our creativity and our freedom. Our great human gift is the ability to craft something new out of our own emptiness. We turn the boring blank page into a novel, the emptiness of a problem into a new solution, the void of desire into beauty and meaning. Our attention is fecund. When we harness our focus, or commit to an orbit, we are, I think, experiencing ourselves as in the image of G-d. Out of Tohu and Vohu—wild and waste—we too, say “v’yehi or” (let there be light) and there is light, as we continue the miracle of beginning anew. We are creators, free beings, centers of responsibility, and therefore creatures of inestimable value.
Where and how we focus our attention is the source of our uniqueness. We share a human condition of dissatisfaction. But what each of us brings forth out of our disquiet is utterly unique. When you numb yourself with cat videos or chasing likes, you miss out on a deeper sense of happiness and fulfillment and you also deprive the world of your unique vision. There are things in this world that only you can see. People only you can love as they deserve to be loved. Future possibilities that only you can inaugurate. Solutions only you can find.
This is why we gather to celebrate you today. By forging an education at Elms College, you have built a foundation from which you can live out the amazing possibilities that lie within you. You have learned something about who you are and what you love. You have found things worthy of your attention and you have begun to envision at least some of the suns around which you will orbit.
Elms’ mission is appropriately lofty: to empower students (that’s you!) to effect positive change in the community and the world, to embrace change without compromising principle, to respond creatively in your career, and to advocate for people in need. You have been given the tools to do each of these great things. Not a single one of which can happen while you are compulsively checking your insta feed or mindlessly clicking on “next episode.” You have spent four years in the embrace of faculty and staff who have given their attention to you—who are themselves called to midwife your birth into this singular power and creative competence. You have been supported and challenged by your classmates as you shared the highs and lows of this four-year hero’s journey. And you have been loved—deeply loved—by the friends and family who have arisen early today and tromped down here to see you in your caps and gowns.
Go forth and do the things that an Elms graduate can and must do. Give your attention to what is worthy of it. Look around at what is broken and bring positive change. Hold fast to your principles even as you remain humble and acknowledge the doubt that is the real sign of mature faith. Find work that ignites your creativity. And spend time looking beyond yourself so that you can see and assist those who are in need.
Give your attention to this precious world and the one life you have to live within it. You don’t want to miss a thing.