Heroes Not Zombies

Spotting this little creature on the petals of this flower hooked me. I stopped, looked closely, drawn by the beauty of the sunlit metallic green colour, particularly against the red petals.

I was more than drawn to it. I was engrossed by it. It caught my attention and for a few moments I revelled in it.

I savoured the moments.

Then, of course, because this is what I do, I took a photograph.

This is one kind of attention.

It’s the kind of attention of the senses. It might be visual, as it was in this case. It might be a sound, like a bird song, or the chirping of a cricket. It might be a scent, like the honeysuckle bush I passed on my walk, or might be the taste of the fresh, juicy gariguette strawberries in the market, or the feeling of the cool morning grass on the soles of my bare feet.

There’s something that happens to the heart with this kind of attention….it slows down. And as it slows down, the “parasympathetic nervous system” becomes active (actually it’s not as linear as that. The world isn’t as cause and effect as we think), and the whole body relaxes, the pupils in the eyes dilate and softly focus. There’s a feeling of peace, joy, delight, ease.

It’s wonderful.

There’s another kind of attention which is the type associated with mental effort. The kind we need when we work with mathematics and logic. In that second kind of attention quite the opposite occurs in the body. The heart speeds up, adrenaline quickens the body, sharpens the mind, produces a very narrow, focused concentration.

We need both these kinds of attention, but sometimes, I think, we rely too much on the mental effort type, and not enough on the kind that melts us into the rest of the universe.