Join a community discovering how living lightly and deeply through seasonal practices of presence can heal both our scattered attention and our relationship with the living world. Because mending the world begins with mending our capacity to truly see it.
Choosing What We See
Published about 2 months ago • 6 min read
The Architecture of Attention According to William James
I was listening to the book “You’re Not Listening” by Kate Murphy (and I actually was listening) when she casually mentioned William James’s thoughts on attention. It was one sentence in a six-hour listen. What did William James, a pioneering psychologist, think about attention, and how can that relate to paying attention to what needs mending in the world? And down the rabbit hole I went. More than a century ago, he understood a meaningful truth when he wrote in The Principles of Psychology: "My experience is what I agree to attend to."
This deceptively simple statement contains within it the blueprint for transformation, both personal and collective. James recognized that attention is not merely a cognitive process but the very architecture of reality as we experience it. "Only those items which I notice shape my mind — without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis, light and shade, background and foreground — intelligible perspective, in a word."
The work of mending the world begins with this fundamental recognition: we are constantly choosing what world we inhabit through the quality and direction of our attention. James understood this with remarkable clarity, describing attention as "the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others."
This act of withdrawal—this deliberate turning away from some stimuli to focus on others—is not a limitation but a liberation. It is the very mechanism by which we can choose to attend to the suffering that needs healing, the connections that need strengthening, and the possibilities that need nurturing. When we scatter our attention across the cacophony of modern life, we lose our capacity to engage meaningfully with the world's brokenness and our role in its repair.
James made a profound observation about what distinguishes extraordinary individuals from ordinary ones. "When we come down to the root of the matter, we see that [geniuses] differ from ordinary men less in the character of their attention than in the nature of the objects upon which it is successively bestowed."
Here lies a crucial insight for those engaged in the work of mending: genius is not about having superhuman powers of concentration, but about choosing to attend to what matters most. The person committed to healing the world develops what we might call "compassionate attention"—the disciplined practice of turning toward suffering, injustice, and brokenness not with voyeuristic fascination, but with the sustained focus necessary for meaningful action.
Today, this choice becomes increasingly radical. As James observed, "Most people probably fall several times a day into a fit of something like this: The eyes are fixed on vacancy, the sounds of the world melt into confused unity, the attention is dispersed so that the whole body is felt, as it were, at once, and the foreground of consciousness is filled, if by anything, by a sort of solemn sense of surrender to the empty passing of time."
How perfectly this describes our relationship with our devices, our social media feeds, our endless scroll through other people's curated experiences. This scattered attention is the antithesis of the focused awareness needed for the work of repair.
The Awakening of Purposeful Attention
"The abolition of this condition is what we call the awakening of the attention." This awakening—this movement from scattered unconsciousness to focused awareness—is the first and most essential step in any meaningful work of transformation.
But awakening is not enough; we must also cultivate what James understood as the will to attend. He recognized that "the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will." This is not merely about personal development—it is about developing the moral capacity to remain present to the world's pain and possibility even when it would be easier to look away.
The work of mending the world requires what we might call "ethical attention"—the disciplined practice of choosing to see what is often hidden, ignored, or marginalized. This means attending to:
The overlooked suffering in our communities—the elderly person sitting alone, the homeless individual we pass daily, the child struggling in silence. James reminds us that "without it, the consciousness of every creature would be a gray chaotic indiscriminateness, impossible for us even to conceive." When we fail to attend to suffering, it becomes invisible to us, and invisible suffering cannot be healed.
The systemic patterns that create and perpetuate harm, attending not just to individual instances of injustice but to the larger systems and structures that generate them. This requires the kind of sustained, analytical attention that can hold complexity without being overwhelmed by it.
The emerging possibilities for healing and connection—the small acts of kindness, the innovative solutions, the moments of unexpected grace that point toward a more whole world. James understood that our attention shapes not just what we see but what we believe is possible.
James was realistic about the constraints of individual attention. He observed that "Not easily more than one, unless the processes are very habitual; but then two, or even three, without very much oscillation of the attention. Where, however, the processes are less automatic … there must be a rapid oscillation of the mind from one to the next, and no consequent gain of time."
This limitation points us toward a crucial insight: the work of mending the world cannot be accomplished by individual attention alone, regardless of how pure or focused it may be. It requires what we might call "collective attention"—communities of people who agree to attend together to what needs healing. When we coordinate our attention with others, we can hold more complexity, see more clearly, and act more effectively than any individual could alone.
In the deepest sense, the disciplined direction of our attention toward what needs healing becomes a form of prayer, not necessarily in a religious sense, but in the sense of aligning our consciousness with what is most sacred and necessary. When we choose to attend to the suffering of others, to the beauty that persists amid brokenness, to the possibilities for repair and renewal, we are engaging in a fundamentally spiritual practice.
James himself hinted at this when he observed that "keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test."
This "systematic heroism" in small things is precisely what the work of mending requires—the daily practice of choosing to attend to what matters, even when it's difficult, even when it would be easier to look away.
In our age of infinite distraction, the most radical act may be the simple decision to pay attention—to choose deliberately and repeatedly what we will attend to, knowing that this choice shapes not only our experience but our capacity to serve the world's healing.
William James understood that attention is not merely a psychological function but the very means by which we participate in the ongoing creation of reality. When we scatter our attention, we scatter our power to make a difference. When we focus our attention on what needs healing, we begin the sacred work of mending.
The world does not need our perfect attention—it needs our committed attention, renewed moment by moment, choice by choice. As James reminds us, "My experience is what I agree to attend to." The question that faces each of us engaged in the work of mending is simple and profound: What world are we agreeing to experience? And what world are we, through our attention, helping to create?
The answer to these questions may well determine not only the quality of our individual lives but the future of our shared world. When choosing where to direct our attention, we are choosing the kind of future we are helping to create. This is both a great responsibility and a great opportunity of our time: to awaken our attention and direct it toward mending our world, which so desperately needs it.
As I emerge from my dive into early psychology, I ask, what needs attending to? And I get to work.
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Mend The World Within Your Reach
Join a community discovering how living lightly and deeply through seasonal practices of presence can heal both our scattered attention and our relationship with the living world. Because mending the world begins with mending our capacity to truly see it.
