Peripheral Visions

inattention during their hours watching television, just as many adults learn to layer their attention in order to get their daily activities done. Infants seem to be riveted by television, but for older children inattention, or diluted attention, is a survival skill, and most adults seem able to conduct a desultory conversation with the TV yammering in the background. Shows are designed to compete for listeners, struggling for the preemptive stimulus, and years have to be spent learning not to suspend belief, not to focus too tightly. It may be that the greatest cost of television for children is not in the content—a mixture of information and fantasy, of the useful and the distorted—but in the ways they learn not to learn, not to attend. But perhaps this is adaptive in the modern workplace.
    Some of the gender differences in the ways males and females are socialized to compose their attention may have a biological basis, but the flexibility of human potentials is such that there is no reason not to assume that all of us could include the full range in our repertoires. Yet “paying” attention in the classroom does seem to come more easily to females than to males, with the result that boys often suffer from punitive efforts to exact attention—several times as many boys as girls are diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. Perhaps the cultural emphasis on docility in females, on wanting to please, is already part of a pattern of multiple attention, in which girls include both the lesson being taught, whether it interests them or not, the teacher’s response to their behavior, and the view from the classroom window. It is perhaps not so much that girls are less easily distracted as that they are less likely to be fatally distracted, to switch their whole attention away from the lesson to something else.
    Increasingly in contemporary society, men and women do the same tasks, but there are still visible differences in the way they do them. Some tasks that traditionally were done by women were elaborated and turned into full-time professions by men. It used to be said that women cook and men become chefs. Women care for the sick and men become surgeons. Women sew and men become fashion designers. Today, of course, women are becoming chefs and surgeons and designers, and are able to compose their lives so that at appropriate times they can focus fully on these vocations instead of weaving them in with other activities. Still, one of the things that has been pointed out about the entry of women into the corporate world is that they often attend to process simultaneously with task—to how things are done as well as whether the goal is achieved. They notice whose feelings are being hurt and who is hesitating to voice an idea, even while working on improving the bottom line for the next quarterly report. A few corporations are beginning to value this skill, but all too often it is unrewarded.
    On kibbutzim, women are almost always assigned to “women’s work”: the kitchen, the laundry, or the children’s house, where child care is shared. This is ironic because what was characteristic of traditional women’s work was not so much that women did these particular tasks but that they did them simultaneously, in a single braid. Working all day in a community laundry is far more arduous than doing the wash in the context of homemaking, emptying pockets of eloquent trash and musing about children’s activities reflected in stains or fraying at the knees, gradual growth, and changing waistlines.
    Concentration is too precious to belittle. I know that if I look very narrowly and hard at anything I am likely to see something new—like the life between the grass stems that only becomes visible after moments of staring. Softening that concentration is also important—I’ve heard that the best way to catch the movement of falling stars is at the edge of vision. Yet we only hear half the story. The command that echoes from years in school, from exhortations and from sermons is always to pay attention, not to be distracted, not to stray. Eyes on the prize, eyes on the ball, eyes on the bottom line. That same resistance to distraction, shutting out the view from the window, has too often meant pursuing some goal at the expense of the environment, of the social system, or riding roughshod over other human beings.
    At one time, I was much enamored of a line of Kierkegaard, perhaps because it suggested a way of being that