Peripheral Visions

essential to her living.
    Women don’t stop caring for children when they start cooking dinner. The current ideal of “quality time” for women who follow a schedule of work outside the home suggests that mixing tasks is inferior even within the home, yet doing a task like shelling peas or raking the lawn alongside a child often makes for a deeper companionship than stripping the moment down to a single focus on relationship. By contrast, many men left in charge of children convert that into a full-time activity. Even though bored, they reject the suggestion that they could have cleaned the house or prepared dinner in the same time period.
    We live in a society that follows the industrial model in dividing activities up rather sharply, assuming that people do one thing at a time and portion out their attention in the same way, perhaps because models of value and achievement are based on activities that have been largely reserved for males. Yet the reductionism involved impoverishes everyone. If only for tax purposes, we are forced to label activities as work, or play, or learning, or therapy, or exercise, or stress reduction, missing the seriousness of play, the delight of good work, the healing that happens in the classroom. For adults, learning is rarely the only activity going on, but it is always potential. By emphasizing a single thread of activity, we devalue the learning running throughout.
    I believe it is important to provide a vocabulary that allows men and women whose lives do not follow the compartmentalized model of a successful career that our society has developed to value their achievements. Life is not made up of separate pieces. A composer creates pattern across time with ongoing themes and variations, different movements all integrated into the whole, while a visual artist combines and balances elements that may seem disparate. When I called an earlier book Composing a Life , I imagined the cover as a classic still life that would defy the concept of separate spheres: maybe a mandolin, and some apples, and drafting tools, arranged apparently casually but actually very artfully on a table. That is the kind of combining and arranging we do in our lives. The mandolin and the fruit may come from different aspects of life, but the art is in the composition that brings them together.
    The way the Iranian village woman structures her attention to combine her different activities and occupations is complex but not original with her. She watched her mother doing it, just as the way farmers and shopkeepers dealt in the past with their multiple tasks was also learned from available models. But the way we now reassemble parts that have long been separated has to be invented as we go along, with an extra layer of creativity and an extra layer of learning, putting together the human rhythms of rest and effort, combining the satisfactions of a promotion or a bonus with those that the Iranian woman gets from serving a meal or completing a carpet.
    To attend means to be present, sometimes with companionship, sometimes with patience. It means to take care of. Its least common meaning is to give heed to, for this meaning has been preempted by the familiar pay attention , which turns a gift into an economic transaction. Yet surely there is a powerful link between presence and care. The willingness to do what needs to be done is rooted in attention to what is. The best care, whether by a parent or a physician or a teacher, is founded in observation or even contemplation. I believe that if we can learn a deeper noticing of the world around us, this will be the basis of effective concern.
    In school, even the word attention is corrupted. If I use it in the title of a lecture, audiences don’t come—particularly on college campuses. Attention is transformed from openness and delight into life’s first exaction and tainted with boredom. Yet to compose lives of grace we need to learn an artful and aesthetic pattern of attention to the environment of those lives, attention that turns and turns again, embracing nature in all its diversity and other persons with all their potentials. We need a broader vision, to match the world in which we act with an image that includes the forest and the trees, the baby and the bathwater.

Longitudinal Epiphanies
    I LEARNED ABOUT BOREDOM in the college chapel of the Ateneo de Manila. Not that I had never been bored before, but I had never before understood that boredom is learned and