LETTERS FROM HOME: READYING FOR WHATEVER WHILE MISSING OUT ON THE HERE AND NOW

March 26, 1998

Dear Leslie,

"Attention. Here and now, boys," a mynah bird in the trees intones at the beginning of Aldous Huxley's novel "Island."

Attention. "That's what you always forget, isn't it?" a little island girl explains to a shipwrecked sailor. "I mean, you forget to pay attention to what's happening. And that's the same as not being here and now."

No matter how many bills there are, attention always seems the hardest to pay.

But what's more frustrating than talking to someone and getting the feeling they're not really listening? That they have not engaged you.

I felt like a shipwrecked sailor when the food poisoning set in on Hawaii. It was one of those times when it occurs to you that some things could actually be worse than death.

One day I backed out of a golf outing, which might give you some idea of the misery that had swallowed me.

DC gave our companions a ride to the course. She returned excited, and promising two surprises ordered me into the car. "Over my nearly dead body," I thought, but she insisted.

We drove along the Maui coast, rising high above the Pacific until reaching a scenic overlook jammed with cars. People were making "Ooooo" sounds and pointing as if they'd seen a miracle. Below us in the water between Maui and Lanai, a chorus line of humpback whales was putting on a show. Raising their flutes, spouting, breaching, all those magnificent whale moves.

I don't think I uttered an "Oooo" but "Oooo" was the feeling.

Continuing on up the side of a green mountain, we arrived at a golf course with a clubhouse from Jupiter. It was as if the curved, brown stone building had been carved from the side of the mountain.

"Frank Lloyd Wright," DC said by way of explanation.

Wright drew up these plans as a house for Marilyn Monroe. She didn't build it but the Grand Waikapu Country Club did.

The ceiling of the enormous dining room is a convex saucer made of glass that seems to shine from within with the brilliance of Hawaiian sunlight.

In those moments with the whales and on the side of the mountain, I no longer was thinking about how I became sick or how I was going to feel tomorrow or about anything else for that matter. In those moments, we are free.

I've been thinking about paying attention because I met a man who knows a lot about attention deficit disorder. He described a simple way to improve your ability to pay attention.

First, simply see all that is before you. For me, it's a computer screen against the yellow wall of our bedroom alcove. The grain of the desk the computer sits on, the weave of the wires running to the socket. Now listen to all the sounds about you: a car coming down William Street, DC's birds chattering in the sunshine in the front bedroom, the crows in our neighbor's tree. Now, smell your surroundings: the coffee in your cup, the oil in the grain of the desk.

These things are all there, all the time, but we are so busy sorting out the past and planning the future that we forget to pay attention to now.

Notice what you're looking at, he says. Let it be the most interesting thing in the world.

Notice what you're hearing. Notice what you're feeling. Notice the smells and tastes. Notice the passage of time.

This is the place where you can touch the sacred, he said.

"This is the place from which we can heal the world. In this present moment."

Attention.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.