This post is the third in a series on creativity and visual thinking. This time, voluntary attention is the issue. Most people in contemporary Western society do not pay very much attention to the here and now. Alan Watts wrote eloquently of this problem in The Book.

“As it is, we are merely bolting our lives – gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in – because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being. If I ask you what you did, saw, heard, smelled, touched, and tasted yesterday, I am likely to get nothing more than the thin, sketchy outline of the few things that you noticed, and of those only what you thought worth remembering. Is it surprising that an existence so experienced seems so empty and bare that its hunger for an infinite future is insatiable?”

We do not have to live this way. We can learn to pay more attention to the here and now. Learning to pay attention need not be painful or boring, as it may have been when you were told as a child, “Pay attention!” Paying attention requires something more than simple exertion of will. Trying to pay attention because you think you should is less effective than paying attention because you want to. When you pay attention because you want to, you are not easily diverted. continue reading »