On being receptive, attentional hygiene and being where my body is

Palmieri's Sesimograph (1855) Encyclopedia Brittanica

The basic problem in measuring ground motions is to attain a steady point that remains fixed when the ground moves.

The Great Gatsby remains a pleasure, even after teaching it dozens of times.  One of my favorite lines comes when Nick reflects on Jay Gatsby, saying

If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away.

The "heightened sensitivity to the promises of life" is one of a dozen phrases that I keep returning to in Gatsby.  Gatsby is a seismograph in this passage, attuned to "the promises of life," a phrase that resonates differently for every reader. 

I've been thinking about being more receptive.  Awe-walks. Noting Ten Things per day.  Writing haikus.  Mindfulness meditation. Being aware of the shortness of life.  All of these things relate to being able to be awake and receptive.

We have to protect ourselves, I think, to be receptive.  What is the opposite of being receptive?  Pig-headedness. Rigidity. "Rejectiveness" - rejecting what the world has to offer.  But these things are not the biggest barrier to being receptive, I think.  Instead, it's "the normal" way of experiencing the world.

What is the "normal" way of being? It's dampers on our instruments of perception.  It’s rushing. It’s fretting. It’s too much on the to do list. It's walking around with earbuds in a forest of singing birds. It's, from the tradition of meditation, having a racing monkey mind. 

In "Walking," (1862) Henry David Thoreau wrote (my emphasis):

I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there is spirit.  In my afternoon walk I would fain forget al my morning occupations and my obligations to society.  But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village.  The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is, -- I am out of my senses.  In my walks I would fain to return to my senses.  What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods?

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Update: Laurie Santos, Yale professor of psychology, and teacher of "The Science of Well-Being," points out that attention also involves social interactions. She uses a great term: "attentional hygiene."  And notes that we even when we're together we might feel like w haven't really seen each other.  "We can get like that with the people we're near in real life, because there's screen things happening.  We're checking Facebook and looking at Instagram, and it can steal the time we do have in real life.  That time is so precious right now, so we need to fight the screens to get some of that back."  Time is precious.  And attention hygiene is necessary to make sure that "we are where are body is" during conversation, too.

She writes:

While I'm on a Zoom meeting, if I have my email in the background and I hear a little ding, it's going to be really hard to pay attention. So we should try to mitigate that by shutting off notifications -- really being careful about our attentional hygiene when we're using this stuff.

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For fun, from Brittanica's entry on seismographs: 

In 1855 Italian scientist Luigi Palmieri designed a seismograph that consisted of several U-shaped tubes filled with mercury and oriented toward the different points of the compass. When the ground shook, the motion of the mercury made an electrical contact that stopped a clock and simultaneously started a recording drum on which the motion of a float on the surface of mercury was registered. This device thus indicated time of occurrence and the relative intensity and duration of the ground motion.

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For more fun: from Wikipedia: 

Monkey mind or mind monkey, from Chinese xinyuan and Sino-Japanese shin'en 心猿 [lit. "heart-/mind-monkey"], is a Buddhist term meaning "unsettled; restless; capricious; whimsical; fanciful; inconstant; confused; indecisive; uncontrollable"

心猿