Stop Thinking and Pay Attention

Day 2

The passages for the next several days are taken from the first chapter of The Remarkable Ordinary (also entitled ‘The Remarkable Ordinary’.) In this chapter Buechner outlines the ways in which the arts encourage us to pay attention and encounter the extraordinary in the ordinary.

“Writing does a lot of other things, of course. People write books to instruct. They write books to move us, to scare us, to enlighten us in all sorts of ways. But basically what these works of literature or of art are doing is to say, Stop thinking. Stop expecting. Stop living in the past. Stop living in the future. Stop doing anything and just pay attention to this. To this boy and this black man floating down the Mississippi River on a raft, this old king going crazy on a heath because two of his three daughters have done terrible things to him; pay attention to this young woman named Anna Karenina who is about to drop in front of a train because her love has failed her. Literature, before it is saying anything else, is saying, Be mindful. Stop whatever else you’re doing and notice. Allow yourself to be seized by this, whether it’s the frog, or the king, or the black man on the raft…

"…So art is saying Stop. It helps us to stop by putting a frame around something and makes us see it in a way we would never have seen it under the normal circumstances of living, as so many of us do, on sort of automatic pilot, going through the world without really seeing much of anything.”

Frederick Buechner, The Remarkable Ordinary: How to Stop, Look, and Listen to Life, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, p22-23.

To help you reflect…

Allow yourself to be seized by something today.

What is happening right in front of you? Stop whatever it is you're doing (or thinking) and offer it your full attention.

At the end of the day, ask yourself: “what did I really see today?”

Photo by Razvan Cristea on Unsplash