We are overwhelmed with distraction. But with a little help from The Promise Ring, Psalm 90, and Mary Oliver, we can pay attention to what matters most.
At the very least you need to know that emo, the music genre, has waves. Waves. Read all about it. There’s first wave emo, second wave emo, third wave emo (my favorite), and now some people think emo is in the midst of a fourth wave. So many waves! So much foaming of emotion and heartbreak and self-pitying.
You need to know about the waves because at the crest of emo’s second wave, the Milwaukee, Wisconsin emo group The Promise Ring released their second album, Nothing Feels Good. All-time great album title, emo or otherwise. I was 13 at the time and living in the Midwest. But I did not discover The Promise Ring until I was 16 and not living in the Midwest.
Anyway, the ninth track on Nothing Feels Good is the titular “Nothing Feels Good.” It’s a slow-burning, moody, low-level angsty pop ballad, I guess? It’s not really a ballad. And the phrase “nothing feels good” isn’t used anywhere in the song. Vocalist Davey von Bohlen instead sings about what he doesn’t know. It’s like a negative epistemology. He doesn’t know east Texas from Louisiana. Maybe because, as he admits, he doesn’t go to college anymore. He doesn’t know anyone. He doesn’t know God. If you don’t know anything or anyone or God, then, yeah, nothing could or would feel good. The song plays as well now with a global pandemic in the rearview as it did in the existentially listless 1990s.
But the most interesting, and haunting, line in the song comes at the end, in the coda. For von Bohlen, it’s a realization that he might know something:
“I’ve got my hands on the one hand / But I don’t know where to put them.”
I’ve been thinking about this line a lot. Partly because it’s on my spring playlist and I heard it the other day driving home from work. Partly because I feel like there are so many (too many?) things vying for my attention and knowledge that I sometimes don’t know what to do with my hands, either.
Emo Moses
It’s comforting to know that Moses—yes, that Moses—expressed a similar thought in Psalm 90. Though the first half of Psalm 90 is moody and angsty, Moses, looking back on the hardship of life and his own struggles with knowing God, ends his song with a sort of doxological prayer:
So teach us to number our days
that we may get a heart of wisdom.
Return, O Lord! How long?
Have pity on your servants!
Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
that we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
and for as many years as we have seen evil.
Let your work be shown to your servants,
and your glorious power to their children.
Let the favor of the Lord our God be upon us,
and establish the work of our hands upon us;
yes, establish the work of our hands!
Psalm 90 answers the vanity and despair of “Nothing Feels Good” with the assertion that it is God who establishes our work, who gives our hands direction and purpose. It’s not up to me to figure this out. I don’t have to know everything. God is merciful and loving. At last, something feels good.
WWRBD? (What would Ricky Bobby do?)
But as hopeful and good as this is, there are some outstanding questions. What are the works of our hands? Did Moses have something specific in mind? What about in my own life, or is that even a legitimate question, given the emphasis on “our work”? If it is, what is the work of my hands? Is it writing? Is it fostering and adoption? Is it humming? Is it all of these things and more?
These are questions Lindsey and I have been returning to over the last several months. And the answer I keep coming back to is attention.
This thought occurred to me one morning while reading Psalm 90, which I often do in the mornings. And it was because of theses line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Sometimes”:
Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.
So I started to wonder, “Is the ‘work of my hands’ first to pay attention?”
Oliver would say yes. It’s perhaps the major theme in her body of work. In her poem “Yes! No!” she says, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” In her essay “Upstream,” she writes, “Attention is the beginning of devotion,” which is a wonderful way to think of work. Vocation as devotion.
I do not want to put words in Moses’s mouth. Maybe there are multiple right answers about what our work is. But paying attention sure seems to make a lot of sense—as the work beneath the work.
Attention, technopoly, and $15 sheep milk
Attention is having a moment. There’s an entire economy built around it. In this economy, we pay with our attention. It is a “scarce and desirable” currency. Our technopoly overlords invest billions to manipulate what we pay attention to. That super computer in your hip pocket delivers limitless pings of dopamine that burrow deeper into your brain even when you’re not using it.
Attention is sexy. Read enough articles on the importance of taking back your attention and you come away with the impression that the Super Important Thoughtful People are slow and analog and think the thoughts of a hipster with an MFA and only listen to John Coltrane. There’s an elitism in this kind of Resistance. Like a farmers market in north Asheville, where a quart of sheep milk is $15 and the grain comes from a Mennonite farm in Virginia that you’ve probably never heard of.
But attention is hard. It is fleeting. It is slippery. It is expensive. When you are fighting with all your being to give attention to someone you love or something worth doing, it feels anything but sexy. Attention exists in the hard, brittle deserts of reality, elusive as water and cold as night.
I read somewhere that in Freud’s day, humanity’s problem was thwarted desire. Today, the problem is the inverse of this. Our problem is not that we can’t do what we want (which requires the ability to give it the proper attention). Rather, our problem is that an infinite number of possibilities and desires exists. Think of all the original content on Netflix; think of the 30,000-plus “distinct occupations” that you could choose for your career path. But if you do think about any of this then you’re likely to feel exhausted and paralyzed by the overwhelming scope of choices to which you could devote your time, energy and, yes, attention.
So we scroll around TikTok instead. Giving up attention and desire is easier than fighting for it.
My hands in his
Having the capacity to attend to what matters is not a new problem. In Jesus’s parable about the wedding feast, those invited to the feast “paid no attention and went off, one to his farm, another to his business, while the rest seized his servants, treated them shamefully, and killed them” (Matthew 22:5-6). And it seems that the capacity for attention is a gift of grace: “The Lord opened [Lydia’s] heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul” (Acts 16:14). Peter, writing about the “prophetic word” of the majesty and truth of Jesus, encouraged his readers to “pay attention as to a lamp shining in a dark place” (2 Peter 1:19).
Ours is a distracted age. I hate how my phone pulls me away from attending to my kids when I get home from work. I worry that we are too busy as a family, in constant motion with very little stillness. The quiet and calm scare us more than the storm.
I take courage in the fact that my hands are established by the nail-pierced hands of Jesus. If I had to establish this work on my own, I would fail. His scars show us the depth of his devotion to us. So, he offers mercy when I’m inattentive. He supplies me grace to pick up the work again, however feeble my hands feel. However unsure I am of my attentiveness to God’s all-satisfying love. God’s faithfulness will always be fuller and richer and more enduring than mine. And that feels good.
