In the Navy part of my job was to pack parachutes, and one of them was used for real.

It was fitted to the pilot ejector seat of an 892 Naval Air Squadron Phantom. The aircraft suffered a catastrophic birdstrike just after take off, and both crew had to ‘bang out’.

Afterwards, the chutes were returned to our section.

Every chute had a servicing record card, and the last name on one of the cards was mine.

I think about that card now and again. Nobody stood over me while I packed that parachute. Nothing told me, at the time, that this one would matter more than the others on the bench. There was just the job, done properly or not, and a signature at the end of it.

The easy kind of attention

When people talk about attention they usually mean concentration, and focus comes easy when the stakes are high. I never had to talk myself into paying attention to a parachute. The whole job was built so that you couldn’t do otherwise. There was a procedure to follow, a card to fill in, a name to put on it, and somebody who would one day ask what you had done. Somewhere out there was a person who would trust that canopy with their life, whether or not they ever knew my name.

That’s attention with the choice taken out of your hands. It was still a choice, of course, but the circumstances made it for me, so it felt like part of the work and not a decision.

The hard kind

The harder kind is the everyday sort, where nothing is at stake, nobody is checking and there is no card to sign.

William James, the father of modern psychology, put it plainly in 1890: “My experience is what I agree to attend to.” Think about how much that says. Whatever you notice becomes your life. Whatever you don’t notice, in effect, never happened. And because attention is limited, every time you agree to look at one thing you agree not to look at something else.

Anyone who has stood a watch knows how this works in practice. The rules of the sea require a proper lookout at all times, and the lookout rarely slips in a gale. It slips on a fine, quiet afternoon when nothing’s happening and the mind wanders off. The dangerous moments are often the dull ones.

The agreement isn’t free, either. Herbert Simon, who won a Nobel Prize in economics, saw this coming in 1971, long before the internet or the smartphone. Information, he pointed out, consumes the attention of whoever receives it, so “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Gloria Mark, a researcher at the University of California, has spent twenty years measuring what that looks like. In 2004 people stayed on one screen for about two and a half minutes before switching to something else. The most recent figure she reports is around 47 seconds.

I don’t think that’s simply weak will. There are very clever people paid to make looking away from a screen difficult. My generation met technology gently, with an electronic calculator at school, dial-up internet later, and a clumsy home-made blog in 2006, and has watched it become relentless. So if attention is a choice, it’s a choice made against a headwind. I’ve dealt with that partly by taking myself out of some of the places that ask for it. I don’t use social media (except for Bluesky), and my writing lives on my own domain. But a headwind doesn’t abolish the choice. Any sailor will tell you it simply means you have to keep making it, and make it deliberately.

Looking without a reason

So why bother, when there is no card and no stranger in a cockpit?

My answer is a plain one. I try to pay attention, not because I’m looking for anything in particular, but because you never know what you may see.

That’s an odd sort of reasoning, and it doesn’t sit well with most advice on focus, which wants attention aimed at a goal. The French philosopher Simone Weil, writing in 1942, called attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” She also thought it was less a matter of straining than of waiting: staying open enough to take in what is actually in front of you, not what you expected to find. That matches my experience far better than the word “focus” does.

Last week, as I stomped round the field on my 🧠Thinking Walk🚶🏻‍♂️, I spotted a funky lime green caterpillar See it here

If I’d not had my eyes open, if I hadn’t been paying attention, I could easily have trodden on it. I wouldn’t even have known it was there. A caterpillar was the last thing I’d have been looking for.

The same card, a different job

Looking back, I don’t think packing parachutes and noticing the ordinary are two different things. A packer’s attention is care for someone you can’t see. The everyday kind is care for a world that can’t thank you or check your work. In both cases, the attention is a gift because it asks nothing back, and in both cases whoever benefits may never know where it came from.

The difference is that the Navy made the choice for me and wrote it down. Everyday life doesn’t. Nobody will check whether I noticed the weather turning, or the person who needed someone to listen properly, or the thing that was right in front of me. There’s no servicing record for any of it.

I’ve come to think that is exactly why it matters. When there is no card, the only signature is your own.