"Looking Around" by Anne Lamott

Excerpted from “Looking Around” in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott 

“Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on.  Now, if you ask me, what’s going on is that we’re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another…

“The writer is a person who is standing apart, like the cheese in ‘The Farmer in the Dell’ standing there alone but deciding to take notes.  You’re outside, but you can see things up close through your binoculars.  Your job is to present clearly your viewpoint, your line of vision.  Your job is to see people as they really are, and to do this, you have to know who you are in the most compassionate possible sense.  Then you can recognize others.  It’s simple in concept, but not that easy to do…

“It is relatively easy to look tenderly and with recognition at a child, especially your own child and especially when he is being cute or funny, even if he is hurting your feelings.  And it’s relatively easy to look tenderly at, say, a chipmunk and even to see it with some clarity, to see that real life is right there at your feet, or at least right there in that low branch, to recognize this living breathing animal with its own agenda, to hear its sharp, high-pitched chirps, and not get all caught up in its cuteness…in those moments, you see that you and the chipmunk are alike, are a part of a whole.  I think we would see this more often if we didn’t have our conscious minds.  The conscious mind seems to block that feeling of oneness so we can function efficiently, maneuver in the world a little bit better, get our taxes [or homework] done on time…

“Obviously, it’s harder by far to look at yourself with this same sense of compassionate detachment.  Practice helps.  As with exercise, you may be sore the first few days, but then you will get a little bit better at it every day.  I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place of friendly detachment toward myself, so I can look out at the world and see all those other things with respect.  Try looking at your mind as a wayward puppy that you are trying to paper train.  You don’t drop-kick a puppy into the neighbor’s yard every time it piddles on the floor.  You just keep bringing it back to the newspaper.  So I keep trying gently to bring my mind back to what is really there to be seen, maybe to be seen and noted with a kind of reverence.  Because if I don’t learn to do this, I think I’ll keep getting things wrong.

“I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have learn to be reverent.  If not, why are you writing?  Why are you here?  

“Let’s think of reverence as awe, as presence in and openness to the world.  The alternative is that we stultify, we shut down.  Think of those times when you’ve read prose or poetry that is presented in such a fleeting sense of being startled by beauty or insight, by a glimpse into someone’s soul.  All of a sudden everything seems to fit together or at least to have some meaning for a moment.  This is our goal as writers, I think; to help others have this sense of – please forgive me – wonder, of seeing things anew, things that can catch us off guard, that break in our small, bordered worlds.  When this happens, everything feels more spacious.  Try walking around with a child who’s going, “Wow, wow! Look at that dirty dog! Look at that burned-down house! Look at that teeny baby! Look at the scary dark cloud!” I think this is how we are supposed to be in the world – present and in awe…

“There is ecstasy [joy] in paying attention…If you start to look around, you will start to see.  When what we see catches us off guard, and when we write it as realistically and openly as possible, it offers hope.  You look around and say, Wow, there’s that same mockingbird; there’s that woman with the red hat again.  The woman in the red hat is about hope because she’s in it up to her neck, too, yet everyday she puts on that crazy red hat and walks to town.  One of these images might show up dimly in the lower right quadrant of the imaginary Polaroid you took; you didn’t even know at first that it was part of the landscape, and here it turns out to evoke something so deep in you that you can’t put your finger on it.  Here is one sentence by Gary Snyder:

Ripples on the surface of water – 

were silver salmon passing under – different

from the ripples caused by breezes

“These words, less than twenty of them, make ripples clear and bright, distinct again.  I have a Tibetan nun singing a mantra of compassion over and over for an hour, eight words over and over, and every line feels different, feels cared about, and experienced as she is singing.  You never once have the sense that she is glancing down at her watch, thinking, “Jesus Christ, it’s only been fifteen minutes.”  Forty-five minutes later she is still singing each line distinctly, word by word, until the last word is sung.

“Mostly things are not that way, that simple and pure, with so much focus given to each syllable of life as life sings itself.  But that kind of attention is the prize.  To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass – seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.”  

Source: Salon.com

Anne Lamott (1954 - ) American fiction/non-fiction writer, political activist; Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life; Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith.; Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year; Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith; Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith