On Attention

A lot of people are not really listening, they’re waiting. Often people are composing their response, managing their expression and deciding how they want to be perceived before you’re even done talking. It looks like presence but it isn’t. There’s a particular loneliness in being on the receiving end of this, when you’re getting the sense that you are speaking into a space that isn’t quite holding you.

Real attention is something else entirely: it’s the difference between being looked at and being seen. The difference between someone tracking your words and someone actually receiving them, letting them land, sitting with them before responding and treating what you’ve offered as something worth handling carefully. For some reason this is rarer than it should be. And once you’ve experienced it, you can’t unfeel its absence.

I’ve spent a long time thinking about what it means to truly pay attention to someone; not as a skill or a practice but as a form of devotion. To be genuinely curious about a person (unhurriedly), is one of the most intimate things you can offer them. It says: you are not interchangeable. I am not somewhere else while I am here with you.

There’s a particular kind of person who moves through the world collecting impressions of others without ever really stopping. People who take what’s useful, while missing what’s essential. And then there’s another, rarer kind, who slows down enough to notice the things people don’t offer freely: the hesitation before an answer, the thing someone almost said or the way a person’s energy shifts when they finally feel safe enough to relax.

I try to be the second kind. It’s just how I’m built: oriented toward people, drawn to what’s underneath the surface of them and more interested in what someone means than what they say. In my work, it shows up as presence. In my life, it shows up as loyalty. The people I pay attention to, I pay attention to completely.

What I know is this: to be truly seen by someone and to have all your particularities noticed and held, (not just tolerated), is one of the deepest experiences available to us. And I think people will do almost anything to feel it, consciously or not. I also think people always remember who made them feel it.

—Xo Frankie Finesse