Want to heal the world? Pay attention.

"One of the misconceptions about the artistic life is that it entails great swathes of aimlessness. The truth is that a creative life involves great swathes of attention. Attention is a way to connect and survive. The reward for attention is always healing."

-- from The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron

Sometimes I forget that simply consuming media isn't the same as paying attention. If I just watch the news, if I just read a good novel, but I come away with nothing, that's not paying attention. That's numbing up, the opposite of paying attention.

I have a confession. For about a year I read celebrity gossip sites on a regular basis. Several times a day. Who's wearing what? Who's breaking up? Will my body ever look like that?

Then I noticed something. I noticed that I felt cynical and sullen and judgmental after my daily immersions in celebrity media. I felt mean. I felt sated and gnawingly hungry at the same time. I felt the opposite of alert, the opposite of joyful, the opposite of what it feels like to pay attention.

So I stopped reading those sites. Not cold turkey. I had to wean myself off, give my brain something else to do. When I felt the urge to click on a gossip site, I went to sites like this instead: The Morning News, a dense, funny, poignant publication with a new post only about once a day. It feels good to read it. I come away from it feeling like I have paid a bit more attention to the world. The reward for that is that my own stream of creativity is suddenly brimming and gleaming, and my desire to connect is at a flash point. I feel healed.

This little experiment made me see that the kind of media I consume makes a significant difference. It's part of why I'm working on HumanKind. I want to help people find their own ways of paying attention. Because like the woman said: The reward for that is always healing.

Looking for a way to make a difference right now? Check out this month's HumanKind Challenge, our drive to collect bed nets for impoverished countries fighting malaria. For $10, you'll do nothing less than save a life.

Liz was co-founder of HumanKind Media. You can read about her here.

Comments

[Tai]

Liz (and Chris),
a truly magnificent website for one truly powerful cause. May this worthy ideal's effects follow you long into your passion's fulfillment.
Thanks for being the change.
namaste
-tai

[David]

Hey Liz, I hear you on the way the media we read shapes who we are. There's a columnist here in São Paulo named Gilberto Dimenstein. He's a respected pedagogue/educator in Brazil. His column is much less him, and much more a collection of snippets about people doing incredible things in for Brazil's children. These snippets are refreshing, empowering messages for the reader who is normally confronted with the usual national news that goes from hunger-to corruption -to police brutality. A story about a trash collector that founds a library in his shantytown does a lot more for me. I hope I can translate one for you guys one of these days.
Keep the good vibes coming.