Gathering Pebbles
Attention, writing, and the inner life
For possibly the first time in the decade and a half since I started journaling, I fell out of the habit. As the spring and summer progressed, most of what I wrote down was lists of things to do and buy. I opened my notebook and my notes app less. I hadn’t felt like I had the time to really write, or the time to be attentive enough to have something to write about.
As life was full, fun, moving fast, and a bit stressful, time for silence, reflection, personal creativity, and spiritual practices did not naturally exist. I knew I would need to make nurturing the inner life a priority if I wanted to have space for it. Not just to generate a decent creative output, but because that’s when I feel most centered, connected, and present.
There’s no way I could describe the inner life for anyone but myself, but for the sake of some sort of framework: for me, a nurtured inner life creates a vibrancy in ordinary life, a state of studenthood in the world, a connection with oneself that is integrated with connection to the world, and an awareness of what I am thinking and feeling and if my actions are aligned with how I want to exist in the world.
Thinking through these things on a walk last month, I opened my notes app and wrote: “To let something be written within me before starting to write it outside of myself”.
Most of my experiences with the writing process have been experiences of gathering of pebbles.
There is no writing without all of the small things that catch our eye, make us pause, and end up in our pockets. And with enough time and attention, these pebbles start to add up. This is the “something written within”.
Then the writing and creating is when you sit down and try to make something of all these artifacts, ideas, and weird tokens from life you have amassed — trying to find some way to arrange them and transform and make something new out of the raw materials of your life and the world around you.
And in the arranging, you might realize you don’t have enough or you're missing something and must venture out again before returning to the work in front of you.
Or you could find that you have all the right stones but what they end up making is entirely surprising.
My pebble collecting usually includes reading the words of others, walking, conversations that take me unexpected places, sifting through garage sales and antique malls, art, the ways other people live their lives, and being in new places. Travel is rich for pebble collecting because there’s so much new to notice. Anything that exposes you to something new or makes you see something old in a new way is a pebble playground.
And in some ways, the journal (and my camera roll) is the basket I hold the pieces in until they start forming something bigger. It keeps them from getting lost — or lost to never noticing them in the first place.
Pebble collecting and arranging requires me to know what I’m thinking about; what’s challenging me. To notice where my attention goes — which requires having attention in the first place.
The inner life is not easy to cultivate. Between working, meal prep, caring for your body, events, relationships to attend to, commitments, podcasts and tv shows to catch up on, chores, and distractions, it’s hard to have time and brain power to spare.
This year I have learned that to be fully present to my life, I can’t keep TikTok on my phone.
I love TikTok. I love the unhinged humor, the fashion and design content, watching cultural moments unfold, and the window into other people’s existences.
But I also value my inner sense of calm, of being creatively and spiritually engaged, and for me, and while my social life might not be a casualty of TikTok, the time I could spend reading, writing, and creating is. My attention span might be too.
There are a lot of jokes, cultural moments, and discourse that only happen online, and when you step away from those platforms, there is a legitimate missing out that occurs.
But the alternative to missing out on trends and cultural jokes is missing out on our own lives. Missing out on details, colors, and textures of daily life that might only show themselves when we slow down. It’s missing out on being bored and what’s on the other side of it.
I’ve certainly collected a few pebbles from TikTok, as well as a few life hacks, three decent products, and a lot of laughs. But I’ve also spent a lot of time watching videos I won’t remember and letting the margins between things be filled with entertainment rather than rest without screens or mindfully moving on to doing something else. It’s not just the two hours in an empty evening, but the six minutes here and fifteen minutes there.
In high school, my school put on a production of Our Town, a classic play by Thornton Wilder told in three acts. It’s simple and haunting, with little or no set and no props. The characters pantomime everything as the Stage Manager talks directly to the audience, walking us through the ordinary lives of the people in the fictional town of Grover’s Corners.
In Act One we meet the town and the characters, living out the daily life of work, chores, being neighbors and schoolchildren, gossiping, and dreaming. Emily and George are high schoolers and neighbors with a growing interest in each other.
In Act Two, three years have passed and Emily and George are getting married with all of the stress, anxiety, and joy that comes with it.
And in Act Three, nine years have passed. The setting is a cemetery. Emily died in childbirth. After her funeral, she watches the life she used to know from afar, wresting with saying goodbye to all she has known, and in a famous monologue cries:
Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I’m dead. You’re a grandmother, Mama. I married George Gibbs, Mama. Wally’s dead, too. Mama, his appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it – don’t you remember But, just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.
And then at the end of her monologue, she asks the Stage Manager:
Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?
Stage Manager: No. The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.
We can’t notice it all. There’s too much to this life to see it all. But we can realize life while we live it some, and, as the Stage Manager said, spiritual practices and art can help us.
I’ve been struck by that since I was 17 — that perhaps both practices of artistry and practices of faith at their best can create remarkable levels of attentiveness and reverence for the details of life, and those committed to the mysterious, connected, beautiful, complicated nature of our existence see the most.
In the same way we tend to notice more when we carry a camera around, when we keep a journal or offer gratitude or set out to draw something or walk slowly in nature, we become attentive in new ways.
In September, I bought a new journal. I’ve kept TikTok off my phone. I’ve been trying to keep my journal near my desk or nightstand so I’m more likely to store pebbles when I find them. I keep taking walks and talking to people.
To gathering pebbles and noticing what we can.