At work, I am usually not the first one to notice. Somebody else sees it, follows it out to what it is going to cost, decides, and has already started fixing it while I am standing right there with my attention somewhere else entirely, and I am the guy who makes things about paying attention.
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It happens on ordinary days in ordinary rooms, and for years I did not think about it at all. Then I did. And what I thought about it has changed how I treat almost everybody I stand next to.
Somebody notices. Then they understand what it is going to cost, in hours or money or somebody's afternoon, which is a separate act from noticing and a harder one. Then they decide. Then they begin. It can all happen inside a minute, while I am somewhere in the middle of something internal that has nothing to do with the room I am standing in.
My attention is not idle while that runs. It is fully occupied, usually with something internal, spiritual, creative, or half-built, and it is working hard. It is just working somewhere else. In those moments, they are onto what is happening in the room before I am, have already started moving on it, and were doing that long before I had any use for it. They were not doing it to teach me anything. They were doing their jobs.
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Everybody has a flashlight. That is the part that gets skipped when people start sorting the world into those who are awake and those who are not. Nobody is walking around in the dark. The beam narrows, and it widens; it points out at the room or back inside, and attention is the hand holding it. People shine theirs on what matters to them, which is the least mysterious sentence I will say today.
A filter changes what gets through it. A flashlight changes nothing it lands on. It just does not land everywhere at once.
So, when somebody's light is not on what mine is on, that is not less light. It is a different aim. Attention differs. How much control anybody has over it differs. Practice differs. So does plain competence, obviously and constantly, and anyone who has worked a job knows exactly who to go to when a thing breaks. I have practiced one small operation for years: noticing when my attention has moved and putting it back. I am better at that than I used to be. That is a real skill. It is also very narrow.
Simon Cotton has been in the room a while. He once restacked The Real Currency and carried it farther than I could alone. Somewhere else, under a piece that was not mine, he wrote that he finds it hard to live in an unconscious world and be spiritual. He called it a tug-of-war. He said he keeps trying.
I know a version of that. I do not know what his days feel like. What I know is that my attention is often down deep in something internal while the world in front of me is asking for a completely different kind of presence, and being pulled in two directions like that is at least the same neighborhood. I am not the guy at the front of the room.
If everybody's light is simply pointed somewhere, does unaware stop meaning anything at all? No. It has to keep meaning something. I can say a man missed a thing he should have seen. I can say his attention was not on the one part of this that mattered. What I cannot do is take that and turn it into a verdict on the whole of him, because I saw one thing at one moment, and one moment is not where a person lives.
A lot of it is not chosen anyway. Pain takes the light. So does a crisis, or being tired past the point of use, or being broke, or a phone that is built to take it. Those things capture attention, and they shrink how much say we get over where it goes, and I do not have a fix for that. None of which is a defense. Where somebody's attention was is not an excuse for what happened while it was there.
Underneath all of this is something I believe and cannot prove. I believe all possible experiences exist, and that God is experiencing itself through individual aspects of humanity, which is an enormous sentence for something that shows up in very small ways.
Inside that belief, the person whose light is somewhere else is not a defective version of me. Their view differs, and that difference does not automatically translate into rank. I cannot prove any of it to anybody. Nothing proves it except reality, and reality does not prove things; it just keeps happening. The infinite possibilities are the proof without proof, and I know exactly how that sounds.
Back on the floor, somebody is already into fixing something, and I am still catching up. I have stopped experiencing that as a loss.
I used to call myself Master Greygray. It was a joke, as I don’t believe anyone is a true “master”. It was only ever a joke. But a name sits on the outside of a person, where a stranger reads it before ever getting to whoever is behind it, and there is no footnote hanging off it explaining that it was funny. If what I am trying to do is hand people something real, Master in front of my own name gets in the way of that. So, I took the word off. It is a rookie mistake to sit outside the room everybody else is in.
Greygray is my creator identity. I wrote it on the tag inside my work overalls, but I have never asked anybody at work to call me that. Most of them would not understand what it meant, and they do not need to. I have thought about changing my first name to Grey, but that would be a choice I made for myself too. Taking Master off the front of Greygray belongs to that same private territory. The name is mine, and any change I make to it is for me, not for anybody else. I got better at coming back. I did not get further ahead.
No ask attached to any of this. The jar is there if you want it.
In the same comment where Simon called it a tug-of-war, he said he endeavors to succeed. I do not know everything he meant by it. What I hear in it is a man who keeps going back.
There is no ahead in this, and that is the part I keep not saying out loud. It is not a road with some people further along it than others. It is a returning, and it always was. I go somewhere else, and I come back, and the coming back is not the price of the practice. It is the practice.
He handed me all of this before I had anything to give back, and that is worth saying plainly. What I have is small. It does get better. The coming back gets quicker, and I notice sooner, and the gap between leaving and returning keeps getting shorter. It never gets any less hard, though, and I stopped waiting for the day it would.
And I do get something out of this. Every time I have handed over the best part of what I have, the thing itself got bigger in me.
It is the thing I would want handed to me, so I am handing it over. Nobody needs fixing. Somebody can look absent from everything I can see and still be paying attention to something I cannot.
The first thing I want to do when I see somebody suffering is save them. That is not generosity; it is a reflex, and I doubt I am unusual in it. But I have never saved anyone, and I do not think it is something that can be done from the outside. People work themselves out, or they do not, and it happens somewhere I cannot reach. I can put my light on something and hold it there long enough for somebody to look. I cannot hold the flashlight for them. There is an old line about handing a man a fish instead of teaching him to fish, quoted so often it stopped landing, and it is still the difference between an afternoon and a life. The pointing is mine. The catching is theirs.
So, Simon, this is for you. Don’t let others' discomfort affect your own. Believe in others while taking care of yourself. Your desire to help others will be seen by the ones who are meant to. The more you focus on yourself, the closer you become to making a change in others. Your flashlight will illuminate what matters and leave what doesn’t. Solving humanity isn’t something for one person to figure out, and the more you help yourself, the more others will learn to take the lead.
What is the person closest to you paying attention to that you are not?
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