You know the state. Something has gone against you and you are turning it over, and you have been turning it over for a while. Iris Murdoch describes about one minute of that, and then describes what interrupts it.
“I am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. Then suddenly I observe a hovering kestrel. In a moment everything is altered. The brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. There is nothing now but kestrel.”
1970
The self did not lose an argument. Nobody talked it down, and she did not decide to stop being resentful. Something else turned out to be more interesting than she was, and while she was looking at it there was no room left for her.
Staying in the brooding has a particular cost, and it is not unhappiness. It is that the world shrinks to the size of the thing that happened to you. Out of the window there is weather, a street, a bird — and none of it is reaching you, because attention is fully occupied by an account of your own standing.
Being taken out costs something too: you do not get to choose when. The kestrel arrives or it does not. You cannot schedule one, and trying to will yourself into the state is just the brooding self taking up a new project.
So what are we aiming at. We want to be the kind of person who is available when the kestrel goes past. Not calmer. Available — attention loose enough that something outside can still get in while we are busy being wronged.
One more voice, because the obvious question is whether anything can be done or whether we just wait. David Foster Wallace, an American novelist, gave a commencement talk in 2005 arguing the opposite side: that you can choose how to construe a situation, deliberately, moment by moment, and that this choosing is what an education is actually for. Murdoch says the self vanished on its own. Wallace says you can go and get it. Both are describing a real thing, and they are describing different halves — the effort belongs to the looking, and the seeing cannot be forced.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- The window over the kitchen sink, while you are doing something with your hands.
- The walk between the car and the door.
- The minute after you sit down somewhere, before you pick up your phone.
In all three the thing to watch is the same — whether anything outside you got in. Not whether you felt better. Whether, for a second, the thing you were turning over stopped being the whole picture.
You are not deciding anything in those seconds, and you are not required to summon a kestrel. Notice whether one got through, and leave it at that.