Stand in a checkout line that is not moving, at the end of a day that was already long, and something is clearly being done to you. The line is doing it. Wallace looked hard at that line and counted what it was actually supplying. Let’s go through his count.
“The supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop…”
“If you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred.”
Look at the three words he gives the place. Crowded, hot, slow. Crowded is a number of people. Hot is a temperature. Slow is a number of minutes. A stranger standing beside you could count all three and come back with your figures. Then he says what is within your power, and what he puts there is the experiencing — all of it, everything that is not one of the three.
One way to stand in that line is the way we arrive in it. The line is doing this to me. That position asks nothing of anybody, because there is nothing to be done about a line, and it is restful for exactly that reason. It is also a false report about where the feeling is being made. It puts the cause somewhere you cannot reach and leaves you waiting for the room to change so you can stop feeling it.
Another way is to take him at his word and push. Decide the line is meaningful. Work at finding it sacred. What that costs is that you are now running an operation, and an operation has a result, and you will check the result. You are no longer in the line. You are standing slightly behind yourself, watching how the construal is going.
His sentence stops short of both. Within your power is not the same as you will, and he leaves it at within your power. The whole yield of really learning to pay attention sits in one word, and the word is know. What comes back is not a better state. It is a piece of information about where the state is being made. That costs something too. You lose the excuse. The irritation is still there in the line, and there is nobody left to hand it to.
So what are we aiming at. We want to know which part was the room. The room supplied a number of people, a temperature and a number of minutes. We are not trying to feel differently about them, and we are not trying to turn the room into something else. We want the list of three to be the size it actually is.
Let us see where this shows up in an ordinary day. Three places.
- The queue at the pharmacy is not moving, and the person at the counter asks you something you already wrote on the form.
- The dishwasher is full of clean dishes, and nothing else in the kitchen can start until it is emptied.
- A page you filled in did not save, and it has to be filled in again from the top.
The one thing to watch in all three is whether the thing you would name as the cause is something a stranger beside you could count. The people, the minutes, the dishes — he can count those. Whatever is left over came with you.
You are not deciding anything in that second, and you are not trying to feel better about the queue. Watch which part was the room, and leave it as it is.