A path towards living attentively
I have always had what you could call, a ‘keen eye’, and a natural attentiveness towards my sensory experience in general. I love observing and sensing life. However, despite my professional background in design, and my lifelong passion for photography, I now realise that I had not given much attention to the process of seeing whilst I was caught up in the everyday rush of life and work. Seeing was something I just ‘did’ and got paid to do – that is, until I met Henri Bortoft.
What led me to first study with Henri in 2008 at Schumacher College in Devon, England, was unfortunately not my love for seeing but my intense discomfort with what my eyes had seen whilst travelling and working overseas as a lingerie designer. During my years spent designing and developing garments for mass-production I got to see the size and scale of the fashion industry with my own eyes; and whilst visiting the factories that manufactured my designs I gained a poignant first-hand experience of the way in which the people who made these garments were treated with a distinct lack of humanity, as though they were no more than just parts of a machine.
After much time spent researching the business models and economic systems which were driving this industry, I soon understood that, at that time, I could not change this cold, mechanical approach to design, to business, and to life, from the inside. Therefore, I left the fashion industry to investigate alternative ways of thinking about and doing business. What I did not expect, when leaving my ‘life’ and profession behind me, is that these explorations would take me right back to the very foundation upon which my career in design had initially been built, my way of seeing.
Attentive noticing
Through studying at Schumacher College, and continuing to dive into the work of Henri Bortoft, and the practices of Phenomenology and Goethean Science, I have come to realise that our direct experience of the world is a crucial gateway that we can each enter into in order to authentically understand the world around us, in terms of itself and on its own terms. Every part of life that has formed on this planet cleverly differentiates itself by expressing unique qualities. Each quality that a form expresses, such as the bittersweet taste of marmalade or the spikiness of holly leaves, discloses part of its ‘language’ of being (what it means-to-be that particular ‘thing’ in the world). Similarly to human languages, we can learn to ‘read’ these qualities, and discover the languages of physical forms, by paying full attention to noticing our direct experience, as we experience life. We can call this process of attending to our experience of the world as-it-is-happening ‘lived experience’.
Henri Bortoft used to say that, for him, the biggest and most significant revolution in twentieth century western philosophy was phenomenology’s ‘discovery’ of lived experience and of the primary role that it has in our perception of the world. Lived experience is our capacity to experience life, as it is being lived, in the present moment. Engaging directly in our lived experience is like dwelling in the hustling, bustling streets of the actual territory that is London, rather than living life by the abstract tube map of the brain’s left-hemisphere. In his latest book, Taking Appearance Seriously, Henri describes the journey towards lived experience, ‘...most simply as ‘stepping back’ into where we already are. This means shifting the focus of attention within experience away from what is experienced to the experiencing of it’.
Experience is not something that emerges within a vacuum; all experience is an experience-of-something. By paying full attention to ‘experiencing’ something, such as the smell of our coffee or the taste of marmalade, the existence of ‘lived experience’ can begin to appear in our awareness. When we pay attention to experiencing life in the present moment we allow our awareness to focus on an unadulterated form of experience. This way of experiencing the world is not restricted by fixed thoughts, or limited by personal opinions, beliefs, desires or expectations.
The ability to focus our attention on noticing our experience of life is crucial if we want to get to know something in terms of itself. In the book, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, the American psychologist James Hillman refers to this ability ‘to notice’ life within the concept of notitia. ‘Notitia refers to that capacity to form true notions of things from attentive noticing’. Hillman continues by commenting on the way in which habitually focusing attention on our own thoughts and feelings limits this capacity of ‘attentive noticing’:
In depth psychology, notitia has been limited by our subjective view of psychic reality so that attention is refined mainly in regard to subjective states. This shows in our usual language of descriptions. When for instance I am asked “how was the bus ride?” I respond. “ Miserable, terrible, desperate.” But these words describe me, my feelings, my experience, not the bus ride which was bumpy, crowded, steamy, noxious, with long waits. Even if I noticed the bus and the trip, my language transferred this attention to notions about myself. The ‘I’ has swallowed the bus, and my knowledge of the external world has become a subjective report of my feelings.
Henri Bortoft believed that perception can only truly begin when we slow down. Our minds often work at an incredibly fast pace, jumping about from one thought to the next. This can be very useful at times. It helps us to navigate our way through the day, efficiently and effectively. However, it also distances us from our experience of the world. Our modern lives tend to follow our thinking in that they too often become hectic and hurried, and we end up jumping from one appointment or daily event to the next. We rarely take the time to slow down enough to use the capacity of ‘attentive noticing’ that Hillman refers to, instead we are drawn into the thoughts and feelings of the ‘I’, which swallows everything up around it.
In contrast, lived experience is the process of experiencing life in the present moment, as we are living it. Bringing our attention to our lived experience involves noticing the think-ing of thought, the say- ing of words, read-ing of letters, eat-ing of breakfast, and so on. In so doing, this attentive form of noticing allows a true understanding of the world to emerge. The Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing also wrote about the importance of ‘noticing’: The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice there is little we can do to change until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.4 Paying full attention to life, as we are living it, allows us to notice our lived experience – our capacity to presence life – before our mind re-presents it. We can stop and momentarily make an effort to notice aspects of life which we usually do not notice any minute of the day. These aspects of the world that routinely get left unnoticed include ‘qualities’.
A quality is not what a part of life is or does, qualities are the way in which life expresses itself through physical form and behaviour. For instance, a rose expresses its unique ‘rose-ness’ through its own characteristic qualities such as, the silky, fragile nature of its fragrant flowers and the fierce, tough nature of the thorns which cover its woody stems. These ‘qualities’ are very different from those which other plants express. For example, a sage plant expresses its ‘sage- ness’ through the softly rounded edges on its elongated oval leaves, and the smooth, downy, fur-like feel of the leaf’s surface. Both the rose and the sage have unique qualities that express part of their own language of being but if we wish to understand these languages we must use our full attention to notice these qualities, carefully and attentively.
Watercolour by Philipp Otto Runge, Farbenkugel. By the end of the 18th century, colour theory had become increasingly tied to psychological theories and typologies like the one depicted by Runge’s “rose of temperaments,” made by Goethe and Friedrich Schiller in 1789 to illustrate “human occupations and character traits,” including the colors of “tyrants, heroes, adventurers, hedonists, lovers, poets, public speakers, historians, teachers, philosophers, pedants, rulers” grouped into the four temperaments of humoral theory carried over from the Middle Ages.
To fully experience qualities we must explore not just what the quality is, but also the way in which it is being expressed. When our attention is directed solely towards what a quality is, such as a ‘red’ rose petal, we often miss the ways in which the red petal is expressing itself. If we look closer at this ‘red petal’, instead of just noticing ‘red’, we may be able to notice the velvety texture of its brightly coloured surface and be drawn into the vibrant intensity of its particular shade of blood-red. These vibrant, intense, velvety qualities are very different from ‘what’ colour the rose petal is and, instead of telling us ‘what’ we are seeing, they point us towards the way in which the petal becomes what it is.
If we wish to understand life in depth and in detail we can use our senses to ‘read’ life’s qualities, whether it is with people, trees, animals, cities, or organisations. However, it is often much easier to ‘see’ or to communicate what something is, than paying attention to the way in which it is being. For instance, if someone were to ask me what that plant is that seems to be running riot at the bottom of my garden my habitual response would be to say that the plant is a stinging nettle. If pressed for further information I might say that it stings you if you touch it and that it can be used in soup, as a tonic or a tea. However, talking about the stinging nettle keeps both of us at a distance from my experience of it and discloses very little of the stinging nettle’s unique qualities or essential nature.
If I wanted to give an account of the nettle that is true to both my experience and to the nettle itself I would need to focus my attention on describing the qualities and form that I have directly experienced, as precisely as possible. For example, I have experienced that the nettle is much more delicate and fragile than its painful sting first suggests. The leaves are very thin and paper-like, and they tear easily. When I lightly stroke the stinging ‘needles’ outwards, from the stem to the tip of the leaf, I have found that they are actually very soft. The leaves have pre-historic looking jagged ‘teeth’ on the edges but this aggressive appearance sits in contrast to the overall elongated heart-shape that they form, which looks as delicate as it does severe. I have noticed that the pointed quality of the piercing sting seems to repeat itself throughout the plant, whether it is in the stinging needles that cover the entire nettle, the teeth on the edges of the leaves, the leaf’s pointed tip, or the thin, upright nature of the stem. My sensory experience has shown me that the nettle seems to embody a paradox, a kind of fierce elegance, an aggressive delicacy.
When we live, and notice, life attentively, the unique living languages of life can come alive within our lived experience. Through engaging with something directly in our lived experience, it will gradually reveal itself to us. If we can perceive something – if we can feel it, see it, hear it, or touch it – whether it is in our body or mind, in our home or office, or in our natural or urban environment, then we can begin to learn its language. All expression that we can perceive through our senses is a form of communication, whether it is human body language, spoken words, man-made environments, natural landscapes, flowers, fruit or a piece of music. Each quality that we notice is a snapshot of being, an instance of something being true to itself and makes up part of what it means- to-be that particular thing-in-the-world. With time, patience and focused attention, these aspects of life are available for us to experience and to authentically understand – all we have to do is attentively notice these qualities as we are experiencing them.
Reprinted with permission of the author, Emma Kidd, from: First Steps to Seeing: A Path Towards Living Attentively, Floris Books (2015), p.11 and pp. 51-55.
1 - Henri Bortoft, Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought, Edinburgh: Floris Books (2012), p. 17.
2 - James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, Putnam, CT: Spring Publications (1992), p. 115.
3 - Ibid. p. 115-116.
4 - Jack L. Seymour, Margaret A. Crain, and Joseph V. Crockett, Educating Christians, Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press (1993), p. 53.