Ch. 3 // Digital Space
📚 The Practice of Attention Book Club 📚
Hi, friends! Welcome to Be Where You Are. This is the fourth post in our low-key book club to read Cody Cook-Parrott’s new book, The Practice of Attention. Here’s last week’s post on Ch. 2, “The Attention Audit,” and here’s the post with the framework for how we’ll do this. If you’re a paid subscriber and you’d still like to join us for the accountability threads & meet-ups, just send me an email and I’ll get you on the list! 💥
This weekend, we had our first virtual meet-up of The Practice of Attention Book Club, and it was really life-giving to talk about how it’s going so far. We talked about the space between self-will and surrender, how self-will doesn’t always cut the mustard when it comes to external distractions, and how our energy at certain times of the day relates to our habits. People shared what it feels like to multi-task vs mono-task and what it feels like to have so many tabs open in our computers and also in our brains. We discussed that feeling of always being on and trying to get stuff done and how it frays us at the edges. And, how those of us with kids and caregiving duties want to figure out how to practice deep attention in the chaotic jumble of caregiving, which this book doesn’t really explore.
Heather shared that she’s also reading Gerald May’s Addiction and Grace and drawing connections with The Practice of Attention. May’s book explores the way we are all addicted to something, and how we lean on false programs for happiness that we learn early in our lives. Even when the app or the game or the overwork (etc) doesn’t satisfy us, we keep trying to fill the hole inside us.
The chapter we read for this week, “Digital Space,” focuses on the way that digital spaces serve us and take things from us, often in the same moment. I’ve written about this before for Romper, and this is the still the main sticking point for me. I don’t want to give up social media because I still connect with many people and communities I sincerely care about and get a lot of joy from those spaces. At the same time, I’m aware that social media and other digital spaces take things from me without me even realizing it (time, balance, peace, clarity, etc) and maybe I’m deluding myself into thinking that ultimately the good outweighs the bad.
If you want to dive into this conversation, you can join anytime because— guess what?!—you don’t have to have read a certain amount of the book to talk about this stuff with us. We’re all living in an attentional minefield and can benefit from sharing our struggles and triumphs, as we dust ourselves off and try again. Below the paywall, you can see what I’m taking from this chapter, and join our discussion in the comments. 🙌🏼