I recently dined with a colleague and his friends at a tony seafood restaurant. Cutting through the center of the space was a “fish market,” loaded with glittering fresh catch artfully arranged on shimmering ice pearls. As we gathered before the opulent display to snap a group selfie, my colleague’s friend said, “Look, there’s a diffuser!”
Buried discretely below the table was indeed a diffuser, pumping out the scent of “fresh ocean breeze.” And now we knew how a table full of dead sea life wasn’t stinking up the joint.
My meditation teacher often says all we have is our intention and our attention. After a lifetime of multitasking, we’ve become well-trained in taking in the big picture quickly and skipping the details. But this cuts off our curiosity, creativity, and ability to learn new things. And that’s just one detail of why it’s essential to notice the small stuff to deepen your experience of life.
A Few Deets About Details
Remember when you were a kid, and your mom said, “Go out and play,” which led to hours of exploration? My BFF and I spent endless days in her backyard, examining every cranny for things to turn into props for our games about magical creatures. (What else do you expect from kids raised on Sid and Marty Krofft?)
In our age of 24/7 screens, societal stressors, chronic sleep deprivation, and other vestiges of adulting, it can feel impossible to focus. But just because science shows kids are naturally more attuned to details doesn’t mean we can’t re-learn how to “zoom in.” As writer David Cain notes:
There’s no need to break everything in life down to molecules. All of those levels of “happening” exist at once. I think there’s a lot to gain, though, by dialing up the resolution a little beyond our default settings, and attending slightly more to the details end of day-to-day life than habit would dictate.
If this sounds like a plug for mindfulness, then good for you! You’re paying attention, and that’s the first step.
Go Into Detail
Cain advocates for using a sensory experience as a gateway — for example, mindfully eating an orange.
The goal here isn’t to steady the mind or gain superhuman focus, only to rediscover that everything in life consists of bottomless detail, that we can attune to those things on a variety of levels, and that perhaps we put too much faith in relatively low-resolution impressions of them.
The same applies to diving deeper into ideas and complex challenges. In other words, bring your conscious intention to pay greater attention to the particulars. This is an eyes-open meditative practice of living in the world vs. your thoughts about the world. The difference there is all in the details.
The Truth is Always Made of Details (Raptitude)
