There is a kitchen I have walked into a thousand times. I could draw it from memory: the countertops, the shape of the windows, the cabinet door that has not closed right since the day it was installed, the coffee maker that takes up half the counter, the hum of the refrigerator I stopped hearing years ago. The other day I walked in after a hard week and noticed something I had never noticed. A series of small dents in the refrigerator door, golf-ball sized, about a foot from the bottom. They have been there for years. I have walked past them more times than I can count.
You have a room like it. Everyone does: the one you could cross in the dark, and have, for years, without seeing much of it.
The dents had not changed. I had not changed. Only my attention had changed, and with it the kitchen. What you can see depends on how you are looking.
“The wisdom of the prudent is to discern his way, but the folly of fools is deceiving.”
Proverbs 14:8
The psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist wrote a book on the same idea: “The kind of attention we pay actually alters the world: we are, literally, partners in creation.” (The Master and His Emissary, p. 28) That is not mysticism. Anyone who has bought a car and then seen that car everywhere for a month has run the experiment. The cars were always there. The attention was new. What you attend to decides, in a practical and daily way, which world you live in, and most of us delegate the choice to the phone, to the deadline, to whatever is loudest.
Four lenses are a way of taking the choice back. They overlap, and you can practice all four on the same moment.
Here is what the four look like working on one moment. It is a Saturday morning and you are washing dishes from last night's dinner with friends. The Material lens notices the dishes themselves: the platter that was a wedding present, the chip on the blue bowl, the fact that you own more serving dishes than any two people need and used four of them well last night. The Physical lens notices the water running hot over your hands, the ache in your lower back from standing at the counter, the smell of coffee still in the room, the 10 a.m. light on the faucet. The Relational lens replays the table: who told the story that made everyone laugh, which friend seemed quieter than usual and might need a call this week. And the Emotional lens catches what is moving through you as you stand there, a contentment with a thread of melancholy in it, because the evening is over and it was a good one and good evenings end.
Most of us lean hard on one lens and live as if it were the whole picture. You can master your work but neglect your health. You can care deeply for others but never deal with what's going on inside you. You can feel everything and still never do anything. You can run every morning and never notice your neighbors. When one lens dominates, life goes out of focus. The imbalance is rarely chosen. Whatever your work rewards is the lens that gets exercise, and the others weaken from lack of use. The correction is to practice on purpose what the job will never make you practice.
The dents are still in the refrigerator door.