When Not-Paying-Attention works

It was revealed to me several weeks ago that I was like a fox prowling outside a group of fenced-in chickens, impatient for my prey, pushing for the thing I thought I wanted. It seemed I did not trust that justice would prevail, that all would work out as it should. I still want what I wanted then, and there is still no balance, but things started to shift when I stopped paying attention.

A closeness has developed between me and IQ...there are moments of intimacy and charge and joint movement and synchronicity and when seem - ever so briefly - to move as one.

They always say that the right things come along when you stop looking for them...a watched kettle never boils...treat 'em mean, keep 'em keen. And yet I have been totally taken by surprise to see how much things changed when I started seeming disinterested. It has been a thoroughgoing shift, and there have also been snippets, brief moments or scenarios when it has emerged that way. Such as when we passed in the corridor, and I was on my way somewhere... he seemed otherwise engaged, and I smiled and said hello and turned to leave: she stopped me, held me with her eyes again, beautifully and intriguingly bespectacled as they were, and asked if I had time for a coffee.

The same so often works in my listening. Olga maintains there is no discernible difference between listening and hearing, a common distinction to make in the experience of music. And while that goes against my instinct, I am increasingly of the opinion that my instinct is just a training of sorts, that I have been led to believe in that distinction without ever having questioned it. I have been training myself to work with music on. Sometimes it works, other times it doesn't, and a lot of the time it has to be the right kind of music. What I get from that kind of listening I'm not yet sure, apart from the benefit of listening to more music than I would otherwise have time to do. But in those moments when I'm not working, and yet not paying attention, such as when I'm driving - switched off, determinedly not-thinking lest I suffocate with the boredom of the A1 - then I can fall in and out of the music, experience something new and worthwhile.

I must learn to trust that Not-Paying-Attention works better sometimes than pushing, prowling, digging a hole under the fence and snatching the chickens. Maybe the farmer will leave the gate open...