What did you miss yesterday?

In the recent PBS documentary about the life and work of celebrated poet Mary Oliver, she said:

My own nature is to like to walk the same path every day to see what I missed the day before.

You can walk the same path every day and barely register it because you’re absorbed in your thoughts. Or you can walk the same path and begin to notice how the tree canopy shapes the sunlight, how each leaf is breaking down in its own particular pattern, or the way your feet register grass versus wood chips versus asphalt.

You can also choose to direct your attention inward and notice your stride length, the way your spine turns—or doesn’t turn—or how your head tilts slightly to one side but not the other.

Attention is a skill. And whether we direct it outward or inward, it supports connection. The more specific our attention becomes, the more there is to perceive—and the more opportunity we have to connect with what we’re experiencing.

I like that Oliver’s comment acknowledges repetition as a necessary component of honing attention.

It’s one of the reasons I continue to offer the Long and Strong Back Chain class every Friday. Aside from it being the best way I know to keep your back healthy, once you’ve absorbed the basic score, the repetition frees up your attention to go deeper into noticing.

You can attend a class and follow the instructions, doing the movements more or less as they’re described, and likely you’ll feel better at the end of class than when you started. Or, as the movements become familiar, you can begin to add more specificity to your experience by noticing.

Where does the movement begin? What happens just before you move? What changes when you do less? Where do you feel the movement most clearly?

This is one of the things I love about repetition. It gives you something familiar enough to stop thinking about what you’re doing so you can become more curious about how you’re doing it.

And that’s where attention gets interesting.