Simone Weil has this great quote from a letter she wrote to a friend: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” I think this holds true in our running, in the different ways we pay attention on our runs and to what. We give our attention to music, to our friends, our thoughts, our worries, our foot strike, a cafe we’re passing, a flowering tree.
I don’t exclusively mean an intense, hyper-focused, rigorous attention, though that’s all fine and good. I very much include daydreaming in my definition. Mentally wandering is a form of attention and a deeply generous act to yourself.
We often talk about attention in popular culture these days. But the conversation is framed as what we get in return (a free app) or what we lose in the attention economy (our humanity). It’s often a very transactional framing.
That’s one of the things I like about this Weil quote. It presupposes that the type of attention that is so rare and pure is a type of generosity. Generosity implies giving without an expectation.
Maybe on a run you pay attention to your Achilles if it shouts. By giving it attention, you start to see what else might be subtly off. Is your form starting to get weird? Do you need to slow down? Speed up? Ask your glutes to fire a bit more? You aren’t expecting a quid pro quo return for your attention to your Achilles. You hope the tension subsides, but that comes from adjusting other things, not really from the Achilles itself.
Hopefully, most of our runs are not solely focused on our Achilles (if so, go see someone). We listen to our own thoughts, our friend talking about their latest date, our music playing through our headphones. We see other runners, some looking delighted with themselves and others as if they might just cry (and probably need more carbs). We pass over mountains, narrow city streets and along ocean shores. We hopefully give the world some attention as we pidder padder through and alongside it.
Running provides us with time to spend in this generous relationship with the world. Paying attention to whatever you choose, but paying attention nonetheless, is an act of deepening your humanity. Even if you spend the entire time thinking about yourself and your problems, it’s still an act of kindness to a being in the world (yourself).
Giving your attention means looking at the essence of something. Often, for me at least, the essence is expansive and extremely interrelated, rather than reductionist. I see how one thing connects to another, and then to another. It’s easy to see this in humans or trees, with their massive root systems and oxygen expulsion. But I mean this with non-living material things as well.
Take a “No Parking” sign I saw on last week’s run. The essence lies in shapes, colors, metal, and the sign’s specific placement. But each of those things requires pulling at this into our current understanding of our world. What is a shape? Who created this shape, and when and how? Why did it become one of the forms I now recognize as a “shape?” Who decided the colors on the sign? What’s the history of the light-fast pigments used to keep this sign displaying those colors for at least a few years in the hot sun? And so on, getting further down other rabbit holes of exploring humanity’s relationship to metals, of why we’ve decided certain places are okay to park or not.
One could easily spin this list in those pages of questions, searching for further essence and only getting more tangled. By giving my attention to this sign on my run, I’m connecting its existence to just about everything. If I did this all the time, with all the things and creatures and people, I’d easily get overwhelmed and not be able to do much of anything.
That’s the fun of doing this on a run. The first premise of a run is that you are moving. I can bring my thoughts about the “No Parking” sign with me, but I cannot stop at it forever. Running allows me to turn my attention to something, give it a generous dollop of my curiosity, and then move along.
This generous attention-giving is also a way to make a run more fun. You can start to actually see the world that is so easily passed through but rarely noticed.