Henry Cowles and Caleb Smith’s thought-provoking exchange raises questions about the possibility, and desirability, of remaining focused and attentive in a culture of constant distraction. They explore the “attention problem” from a variety of angles: rising “moral panic” over smartphones; self-help techniques that peddle mindfulness, yet turn us into ever-more efficient worker bees; the conscious refashioning of humanities disciplines as sanctuaries for immersive attention, close reading, and authentic connection (even while the collaborative spirit of the sciences underscores the solitary nature of humanities research). As their conversation makes clear, all sorts of people throughout the ages, from monks and mystics to the first practitioners of modern science, have worried about distraction.
And yet, the problem of attention feels somehow different today—serious and agonizing in a way that makes an ethical claim on us and renders terms like “moral panic” a bit too dismissive. Cowles and Smith’s exchange brought to mind a recent conversation between the writer Kathryn Schulz and political commentator Ezra Klein. The dialogue is built around Schulz’s memoir, Lost and Found, an extended meditation on grief and happiness that is also, ultimately, about attention. Schulz dwells on the strange dissonance that comes with inhabiting competing and seemingly incongruous worlds simultaneously. In a set of sober reflections that opens their conversation, Klein describes this experience in terms that resonated deeply with me:
“I don’t know how to hold all the feelings, even all the thoughts I should have in a day. Right now, the emergency is here, and the kids need help with their homework. I have friends who have fallen terribly ill and others who have just seen their test results come back clear … I look down at my phone at smoldering ruins in Ukraine and Gaza and Sudan, and then I look up into a spring day.”
At a time when our attention spans are notoriously compromised, a strategy of “flooding the zone” aims precisely to leave us feeling hopeless, powerless, overwhelmed, and alone. Klein acknowledges that attending to what is urgent in the midst of the banal is not exactly a new challenge, “but I guess I’m feeling more alive to it right now. More overwhelmed by it right now. More curious about how to keep myself open to it right now.” The capacity to remain attentive, open to the incessant barrage of news—war, environmental collapse, the daily dismantling of our democratic institutions—is what the MAGA “distraction machine” is designed to destroy, we are told.
Schulz’s memoir is not directly about the clashing worlds problem as Klein eloquently describes it, but their conversation is wide-ranging and well worth your time. Specifically, Schulz explores the dissonance she experienced in grieving the loss of her beloved father while discovering and falling joyfully in love with her life partner. As a friend noted recently, posting good news on social media (“My book is out!”; “I landed a job!”) seems lately to require a prior disclaimer or apology-in-advance, to clarify that the sharer of glad tidings is not wholly oblivious or insensitive to the horrors of the present world. Yet the puzzling reality, as Schulz muses, is that wonderful things do happen in the midst of truly awful things, and vice versa. A writer fascinated with different timescales, Schulz revels in what seems incommensurable.
The book opens with a detailed analysis of the word loss—its history and multidimensionality. How did we come to use the same term for the death of a loved one and the outcome of a boardgame? Why do humans lose things so often and easily, and why are some people, who appear otherwise mentally intact, especially prone to this behavior? Schulz covers similar terrain regarding the various meanings of found: finding can be an act of discovery or one of recovery, for example. She ponders the age-old puzzle of how you can find something when you don’t know what you are looking for. Both losing and finding alter our sense of scale in humbling ways, “reminding us that the world is overwhelmingly large while we are incredibly tiny.” A difference is that finding is more often a source of wonder. And yet, even (or especially) painful losses may render us more attentive to what we have. Thus, as Schulz makes clear, losing and finding are deeply entwined with the art of attention, though not always in ways we would expect or over which we have control.
For the past few years, I have been teaching an undergraduate course called “Nature Spirituality,” which is cross-listed between environmental studies and religious studies at UC Santa Barbara. Attention as spiritual practice—in Greek, prosoche—has been an abiding theme since its inception. This past spring, however, there was something remarkable about the decidedly central role that the art of attention came to occupy, both for me and the students.
Prosoche is a term that derives from ancient Stoicism. The practice has long shaped various forms of monasticism and other contemplative practices. Prosoche (προσoχή) translates as focused attention, care, or vigilance. (My sister, a poet who has taught herself Greek, tells me that, like the German word Achtung, prosoche often conveys warning or danger—watch out! Signs displaying the word are common throughout Greece.)
I typically introduce the term to students by way of Douglas Christie who argues that, properly cultivated, prosoche orients the practitioner toward the natural world in a manner that reveals the reality of its wholeness. The categories of religion and science, especially as they are conventionally and unimaginatively understood, tend to bifurcate the world. This creates a sense of alienation not only between the two “disciplines,” but between the disciple of each method and the larger world. Science does this through investments in radical reductionism and materialism; religion through radical transcendence and stubborn dualisms. Prosoche, Christie argues, can heal fragmented and detached perception, situating the practitioner as a participant in a wondrous whole.
To illustrate the turn from a potentially world-fleeing form of prosoche (nature as mere stepping stone to contemplation of God as ultimately real) to a genuinely nature-focused and ecologically transformative practice, Christie invokes Charles Darwin. I cannot do justice here to his claims, but in essence he argues that prosoche not only overcomes the false and “corrosive” dichotomy of religion and science; it also reveals the discipline of attention as a deeply relational—one might say social—practice. Drawing on the work of Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Christie depicts Darwin as embodying a profound watchfulness that allowed him to slip virtually undetected into the social worlds of other creatures. Darwin cultivated a deep sensitivity “to the life-forms around him and to the meaning of his own relationship with these life-forms,” Christie writes.
With carefully honed humility that “made him strangely slender” (Haupt’s words), Darwin peered into nature “through doors only slightly ajar.” All this watching and peering might sound intrusive or objectifying, but Christie imputes to Darwin an engrained habit of “sympathetic participation.” (Christie does not trace its provenance, but the phrase originated with Darwin’s granddaughter who edited much of his work, including his “Ornithological Notes” and Autobiography.) This humble stance—Darwin’s refusal to regard humans as separate or exceptional—allowed him to discern the workings of natural selection where no previous observer had. A seemingly solitary figure in the wild, Darwin seamlessly integrated himself into the “entangled bank” he famously contemplated.
I was not conscious this past spring of placing more stress than usual on prosoche, but the students took it up with notable zeal; in assignments and spontaneous in-class reflections, prosoche emerged as the connecting thread. I wondered if the term gave them a name for a contemplative alertness they sensed they were losing, or never had. In other ways too, themes of attention and loss cropped up in local news stories and casual conversation.
Early in the spring quarter, the university community received emergency alerts of a black bear on campus. The bear was repeatedly lost and found. It was seen lurking near the campus theater and surveying the athletic facility. Later, it reappeared outside a student housing complex, standing on hind legs, stretching contentedly toward a tree. Efforts to capture and relocate it failed. “Be aware of your surroundings,” the alerts warned us.
Initially, these sightings held a certain charm. For a university with no football team, and a vague and dubious mascot, the bear seemed to lend our campus a sense of identity. Students created memes of the bear striking studious poses at the library, or scrapping with our octogenarian chancellor. Some tracked its meanderings on social media, even as the large, lumbering creature eluded campus police. After the initial flurry of alerts, days passed with no updates. Had the bear found its way home?
“How do you lose a bear?!” an exasperated freshman lamented to me during office hours. She was a native of Colorado where bear sightings are common and thoughtfully managed. Her question was a reproach of Santa Barbara, a place defined in equal measure by unsurpassed natural beauty and the distractions of inordinate wealth: wine country and celebrity villas, a penchant for vanity-plated luxury cars, and, well, vanity. “In Boulder,” she assured me, “we’d never lose a bear.”
My conversations with the student became a regular and enchanting feature of my life. She emerged as a character in stories I told my husband about my workday. I began referring to her affectionately as “How-Do-You-Lose-A-Bear.” “I was in my office today past 6pm talking to How-Do-You-Lose-a-Bear,” I would report over dinner. Or: “You have to read this beautiful paragraph written by How-Do-You-Lose-A-Bear!” She and I once carried on a three-hour Zoom conversation about her deeply (and appropriately) ambivalent reaction to the documentary film My Octopus Teacher. During one office visit, she revealed in an undramatic way her struggles with a rare autoimmune disorder (now largely managed but unpredictable), and how she’d woven her illness narrative into her college admissions essay. “They like students who are sick,” she observed with frank and startling precocity, “but not too sick.”
How-Do-You-Lose-A-Bear was that vanishingly rare breed of student who, of her own volition, read entire books. Given her talent for sustained attention and recall, I was not surprised to learn of her fondness for memoirs, and we compared notes on our favorites. In one of my attempts, both subtle and unsubtle, to nudge her away from her intended science major, I suggested she might one day write her own memoir.
A somewhat speculative etymology connects the word memoir to mourning. The link between memory and grief seems obvious, but Schulz’s phrasing is vivid and clarifying: “Grief confuses us by spinning us around to face backward, because memories are all we have left.” And yet, she notes, when someone dies, it is not the past we mourn but the future. Consequently, the present becomes more significant, for that which goes missing has “something urgent to say about being here.” Lack of attention can engender losses in registers ranging from the mundane and inconvenient to the profound and devastating: the lost credit card, the loss of a species. The problem of losing things, she argues, is more generally “the problem of how to live.”
As April wore on, the bear sightings slowed and then ceased. Then, on April 22, 2025, a bear was reported killed on highway 101, south of the city, in a collision with a large luxury SUV. That day was Earth Day. The news reported that, given certain details of the animal’s pawprints and recent movements, plus the rarity of black bears in urban Santa Barbara, it was highly probable that the dead creature was our celebrated campus visitor. Echoing my student’s lament, a local newspaper asked: “Why Couldn’t We Just Save the Bear?” In this age of high-tech surveillance, how hard could it be?
Reminders of attention, distraction, and loss continued to surface. So did the missing bear—although, as Schulz’s perceptive analysis suggests, not in ways we might have wanted or anticipated.
In mid-May, I arranged a campus tree tour for my class. Our guide, a doctoral candidate who conducts such tours annually, is a quirky font of plant knowledge. We formed a large circle in a courtyard as she discussed varieties of eucalyptus trees and the vitriol directed at them as an invasive, flammable species. I scanned the group—nearly fifty students in total—and was struck with the realization that each and every one of them was listening with rapt attention. Not a single student was looking at a phone. There were no earbuds in sight. Each time our speaker paused, students peppered her with questions. Nothing quite like this had happened within the four walls of our classroom, I noted, with a mixture of envy and awe.
Later on course evaluations, the pattern emerged again. In response to a question about what students would remember most from the class, many emphasized the importance of paying attention and often referenced prosoche—that new and arcane word: “I will remember the concept of prosoche as a practice I can apply in my own life.” Another said: “I will be stepping away from this class with more reverence for my surroundings.” Some mentioned the tree tour. Well, I thought, this is very interesting. A mere hour or so outdoors—not even a bona fide field trip, just the briefest immersion in a landscape the students see every day of their lives—that had proved a formative experience.
That morning, as we were led away from the eucalyptus toward the next notable tree on our itinerary, a group of students lingered around a tree that resembled a slightly deformed elephant. They chatted in a quiet, animated way, their fingertips tracing patterns in the smooth gray bark. I stared at the tree, unseeing. Several seconds ticked by.
“What am I looking at?” I finally asked.
“Claw marks,” a student explained. “Bear claws.”
The lost bear, briefly our bear, had been dead nearly three weeks. We had not been able to save it. But it had left us a sign—a warning, perhaps. Next time we would have to do better.