A geographer’s philosophy of attention

A framework

I’m developing a framework to help anchor my thinking:

Attention → Understanding → Decision → Action → Flourishing

This is not intended as a rigid sequence, or a formula for self-improvement. It is a process, a method, something that everyone has to work through to define for themselves.

I know from my own experience that the process is rarely linear. I sometimes act before I understand, or I act from an intuitive rather than an intellectual understanding. I can understand something for a long time before I am ready to make a decision about it. An action may reveal that my stated values and my real priorities are not quite the same. A decision that seemed right may lead to an unexpected or difficult result.

The framework is therefore not a set of stages to complete. It is a lens through which I can examine how I am engaging with my life.

Thinking of this as a continuous cycle (it’s turtles all the way down) helps me think about progress towards enlightenment, towards wisdom, towards a refinement of truth as I understand it as every new layer is revealed. It remains self-referral. Flourishing helps us remember why change matters.

Attention

Attention is where I begin to engage with the world in a conscious way. It’s the first act of bringing conscious awareness.

Before I can understand something, decide what it means or respond to it, I have to notice it. This might mean noticing tension in my body, a repeated pattern in my relationships, the assumptions about a professional decision or the way a particular environment changes how I feel. It might mean noticing birdsong, light, colour, scent or the emotional quality of a familiar place.

Some of these things appear trivial or more surface level, some have more obvious consequences, while others are more subtle or profound. They come from the same basic capacity: the ability to turn towards something and allow it to become perceptible.

Attention is not neutral.

What I notice over and over begins to feel important – humans are good at spotting patterns. What I continually overlook may remain outside my understanding and therefore outside my care. My attention is also shaped by forces beyond my conscious control: technology, habit, culture, fear, desire, education, professional expectations and the demands of other people.

For me, the act of cultivating attention is not about sustaining a perfect focus, or still mind, free from distractions. It means becoming more curious about where my attention goes, what directs it and what remains unseen.

It also means learning different ways of paying attention.

• Analytical attention: looking for evidence, patterns and explanations.

• Sensory attention: noticing colour, movement, texture, scent, sound and the body’s responses.

• Relational attention: listening closely enough for another person to become more than my assumptions about them.

• Moral attention: recognising suffering, exclusion, care, responsibility and consequence.

• Spacious attention: remaining with an experience without immediately trying to categorise, improve or use it. Leaving space for awe and wonder.

I am interested in all of these forms, and in what each allows me to perceive.

Understanding

Noticing something is not the same as understanding it.

Attention brings something into view, while understanding asks what it might mean. This is where I reflect, research, read, write, talk to other people and look for relationships between things that first appeared separate. Synthesis and analysis.

My geographical thinking shapes the questions I tend to ask:

• Where is this happening?

• What surrounds it?

• What relationships and systems shape it?

• How did it come to be this way?

• At what scale does it need to be understood?

• Whose perspective is visible?

• Whose experience or knowledge is missing?

• What changes when I look from another position?

These questions help me resist treating an experience as though it exists in isolation. Exhaustion may be personal, but it may also be connected to how work is organised. I can feel lonely, but I can also recognise how it is influenced by the design of neighbourhoods and institutions. The objects I buy connect my home to landscapes, labour, trade, histories and ecological consequences elsewhere. Understanding means trying to see these connections without losing sight of the immediate human experience within them, with nuance and humility.

I can pay close attention and still misunderstand. I can gather information and remain limited by my own position – knowledge is structured in consciousness. Understanding is not the point at which uncertainty disappears. Often, it is the point at which I begin to appreciate how much more complicated something is than I first imagined.

I want Waymark & Wonder to give me space to remain with that complexity.

Decision

Understanding creates the possibility of conscious choice.

Many of the decisions shaping my life have not felt like decisions. They have been habits, expectations, default paths or ideas I absorbed about what a successful and worthwhile life should contain. Some have aligned with who I am, others have required closer examination to understand which me was in the driving seat, and whether I wanted to prioritise something other than that version of me wanted.

The question at the centre of this stage is: given what I now see and understand, how do I want to respond?

That may involve a large decision about work, relationships or how I want to use my time. It may be a small decision about what deserves my attention today. It may involve beginning, ending, speaking, refusing, resting, making, caring or waiting.

Decision is where the inquiry becomes ethical. It asks me not only what I want, but what I value: What kind of person am I trying to become? What responsibilities do I hold towards other people? What am I helping to sustain through my choices? What am I willing to change?

I do not want to confuse conscious choice with unlimited personal control, as I frequently have to check myself with taking responsibility for problems that I didn’t create and cannot solve (world peace, cancer, child poverty…). My decisions are shaped by health, money, power, social conditions, responsibilities, history and chance. Not every person has access to the same options. A philosophy of conscious living that ignores material constraints would quickly become another way of blaming individuals for circumstances they did not create.

But recognising those limits does not make reflection and choice meaningless. It makes the relationship between individual and collective agency more important.

I want to understand both the decisions I can make within my own life and the conditions that determine which decisions are available to different people.

Action

Action is where a decision enters the world. It is where a value becomes visible through behaviour, practice, relationship, design or collective effort.

Action can be dramatic, but most of it is ordinary, and honestly, that’s where and how I like it. I find I am more the product of the daily actions I make than the once in a lifetime experiences I love having. It means different things on different days, from changing how I speak to someone, protecting time for creative work, reconsidering a professional practice, spending time with other people to work on a particular social cause, writing something, voting, teaching, repairing, travelling, resting or going somewhere that makes my soul feel big and small at the same time.

I do not want to romanticise small personal actions as substitutes for structural change, but I don’t want to only take action if I expect it to completely transform my life or the world.

Individual and collective action are connected. The practices of my own life shape the person I become. The decisions we make together shape the conditions in which lives can be lived.

Once I act, something happens as a result. It might be an emotion, a consequence or a response. I discover what changed, what failed, what surprised me and what remained beyond my control. The action creates a new experience. Action is not the end of the process as this experience asks for reflection and renewed attention. I may need to revise my understanding, make another decision or recognise something that I could not previously see.

The fuller cycle is therefore:

Attention → Understanding → Decision → Action → Experience → Reflection → Renewed attention

I do not expect to complete this cycle once and arrive at a perfectly conscious life. It is an ongoing practice of orientation.

What the practice is for: Flourishing

I do not want to cultivate attention simply to become more informed, disciplined or effective. I am doing this in search of a life that feels more aligned, meaningful, fulfilling and alive.

Flourishing is currently the word I’m using to describe what this practice is in service of. It includes happiness, but it is not the same as constant happiness. A flourishing life can contain difficulty, sorrow, effort and uncertainty. Some of the most meaningful decisions we make may not feel pleasurable in the moment.

For me, flourishing includes happiness, meaning, vitality, connection, agency, curiosity, care and the possibility of becoming more fully myself. It involves using my capacities in ways that feel worthwhile and building relationships with people, places and practices that deepen my experience of being alive.

When the way I use my time and attention is consistent with what I say I value, my life feels more coherent and recognisably my own. When there is a sustained gap between my values and my actions, I feel that disconnection even when the life I am living appears successful from the outside.

Fulfilment is also part of flourishing, as it comes about when we can direct our capacities towards people, activities, relationships and purposes that feel meaningful to us. It is not a single destination or universal definition of the good life. Each person must participate in discovering what fulfilment means within the circumstances of their own life – that’s what makes life interesting.

This is where my personal inquiry becomes collective.

I want to explore how I can build a life that feels more consciously chosen, while remembering that no life is built independently of the world around it. My flourishing is connected to the conditions I help create for other people, communities and places.

Flourishing is therefore not the final step after action. It is the orientation of the whole cycle: the reason to pay attention, seek understanding, make decisions and act at all.

A life consciously chosen

Much of this inquiry comes from a desire to participate more deliberately in the shaping of my life, and to share the practices I’ve picked up along the way.

That does not mean trying to control every outcome or constructing an ideal existence through endless self-analysis. I do not want Waymark & Wonder to become another optimisation project, or another endless to do list. I need more ease, more flow and more softness, less hustle and grind. For me, that allows my life to unfold more effortlessly, which makes the joy of my attention richer and easier.

A consciously chosen life can still contain uncertainty, obligation, compromise, accident and contradiction. It can include decisions I later revise and paths whose meaning only becomes visible in hindsight.

For me, conscious choice means developing a closer relationship with my own experience, noticing what makes me feel safe in my body, my life, and my relationships and what drains the joy, creativity or passion out of me. I am examining the stories I inherited about success, belonging, work, productivity, beauty and enough. I am getting better at distinguishing between what I genuinely value and what I’m just good at.

Yoga practice teaches me that while I’m not able to choose every circumstance I experience, I can become more attentive to how I respond, and build space between my initial reaction and the reaction I want to choose. At a collective level, I can also ask what needs to change so that more people have meaningful choices available to them. Societies have habits of attention just as individuals do, and ours have been shaped by an accelerating level of communication technologies. We have collectively wrestled with what gets attention in the age of algorithmic content. I am fascinated by who gets to speak and through what platform, and questions about the role of the expert in modern society. I think that what a society notices influences what it understands. What it understands – or fails to understand – shapes the choices it makes.

The same framework therefore appears at different scales, both personal and global. I can use it to think about my daily routine, my career choices or my relationships, while also using it to understand how I think about the choice of what tea I buy, how public transport infrastructure should get investment or which complex social challenge I donate my resources to fighting. I find this ability to flow between scales with these practices fascinating. Where is the point at which our individual experience becomes a societal choice, or where a societal structure changes the experience of my individual life?

Why geography?

Because geography, at its heart, is the study of relationships: between people and place; between landscape and culture; between movement and meaning; between scales; between systems.

Geography taught me that nothing exists in isolation – people are shaped by relationships, histories, environments and systems, and places are not simply locations – they are made through memories, materials, movements, meanings and encounters.

Geography also teaches me about movement between scales, from hyperlocal to global. A cup of tea can connect a kitchen to weather, soil, trade, colonial history, agricultural labour and personal ritual or cultural practices. Walking through a new city can reveal questions of access, ecology, safety, memory, public space and belonging.

The routine of the everyday and planetary rhythms continually meet.

A geographical perspective reminds me that where I stand affects what I can see. Moving to a different position, literally or intellectually, may reveal another perspective on a landscape I think I know well or a completely different environment. It also gives me the language of orientation. To orient myself is not necessarily to know my final destination. It is to understand something about where I am, what surrounds me and what directions might be possible.

This is what a waymark offers. Waymarks don’t dictate the journey; you can still wander off the path if you see something interesting. But waymarks are a point of recognition, a reassurance, something that helps you locate yourself and continue with a little more awareness.

I do not want Waymark & Wonder to prescribe a single version of a fulfilling life. I want it to gather ideas, practices, questions and encounters that may help me, and maybe others, develop a stronger sense of orientation.

The role of wonder

If a waymark represents orientation, wonder represents openness.

I have sometimes thought of wonder as a reaction to the spectacular: a dramatic landscape, an exceptional work of art or an unfamiliar place. But I am increasingly interested in wonder as a way of meeting the ordinary world, where wonder is the willingness to look again at things that are easy to overlook (as unlikely as butter).

Wonder acts to interrupt the speed with which I categorise and dismiss things. It makes me pause between encounter and explanation, allowing a person, place, object or idea to remain more complex than my first judgement of it. Wonder does not require me to believe that everything is beautiful or good, as I can wonder about things I find baffling, painful, unjust or unsettling. Wonder is a route to insight, not necessarily (just) delight.

Wonder protects attention from becoming purely instrumental. I do not want to notice the world only in order to analyse it, improve it or extract useful information from it. Attention can also be a form of relationship, pleasure, reverence and care.

Wonder is therefore not merely one of the tools within the framework. It is part of what makes a life feel worth inhabiting. I need my life to be filled with curiosity, delight and surprise rather than assessing everything for its utility or what I can extract.

The two halves of the name represent complementary movements:

• Waymark: orientation, discernment and direction.

• Wonder: openness, curiosity and possibility.

I need enough orientation to make decisions and act. I need enough wonder to remain open to being changed by what I encounter.

Practices as fieldwork

I am interested in the practices that strengthen different parts of the cycle: practices that help me notice, understand, decide, act, reflect and flourish. These include walking, travel, writing, reading, research, conversation, yoga, movement, making, sensory exploration, time in nature, creative work, community and rest.

I do not think these practices belong together because they form a particular lifestyle or aesthetic. They belong because each offers a different method of inquiry.

• Walking changes the speed and scale at which a place becomes perceptible.

• Travel can unsettle the assumptions created by familiarity. Attending more closely to home can reveal that the familiar was never fully known.

• Writing allows me to remain with an observation, test its meaning and discover what I think.

• Reading puts my thoughts in conversation with minds, lives and traditions beyond my immediate experience.

• Yoga and movement make the body not merely something I possess or manage, but a source of knowledge and perception. The experience of my internal world is foundational to my experience of the external world.

• Making things teaches me about materials, patience, skill, limitation and the movement from imagination into form, and gives me insights into different traditions and cultures.

• Conversation reveals the edges of my own perspective and allows understanding to be created between people.

• Nature places me in relation to systems, timescales and forms of life that do not revolve around human priorities.

• Scent, food, sound, image, touch and other sensory experiences can return depth and texture to parts of life that have become abstract or automatic.

• Community allows attention, understanding, decision and action to become shared.

• Rest creates the space in which experience can be absorbed. Without rest and reflection, even a philosophy intended to resist optimisation could become another demand for constant activity.

I think of these practices as forms of fieldwork. They are ways of entering the world with curiosity, gathering experience, testing ideas and returning with different questions. The field is not somewhere separate from ordinary life. Waymark & Wonder will be a record of that fieldwork.

An evolving inquiry

Some of the questions I want to explore are:

• What does it mean for me to cultivate attention well?

• How is my attention shaped by place, culture, technology, work, habit and power?

• What becomes visible when I slow down or change the scale at which I am looking?

• How can I tell the difference between a life I have consciously chosen and one I have inherited?

• What does alignment actually feel like in an ordinary life?

• How can I pursue happiness and fulfilment without turning myself into an endless improvement project?

• What is enough? What is ‘good enough’?

• Which practices deepen my understanding and enrich my experience of being alive?

• What deserves my care?

• What can geography teach me about identity, belonging, movement and orientation?

• What forms of knowledge emerge through the body, the senses and creative practice?

• How do personal choices connect with collective conditions?

• What enables a person, relationship, community, place or ecosystem to flourish?

• What would our organisations, cities and technologies look like if they were designed to support attention and flourishing rather than only productivity and consumption?

• How can I remain open to wonder while still making decisions and acting with conviction?

I expect these questions to change as I pursue them. I will explore them through reading and research, but also through walking, travel, making, movement, listening, conversation, experimentation and participation in the world.

At the moment, the central proposition I am testing is this:

What I pay attention to shapes what I understand. What I understand shapes the decisions I am able to make. My decisions shape how I act. My actions shape my experiences, my sense of self and the world around me. By reflecting on those experiences, I learn to pay attention differently.

Through this continuing practice, I hope to build a life that feels more conscious, aligned and fulfilling, while contributing to the conditions in which other people, communities and places can flourish. By including tools to cultivate both intellectual and intuitive knowing I hope to find a good balance between mind and heart, rest and activity.

To cultivate attention well is not only to experience more beauty or presence, although I hope it may allow both. I am doing this to:

• become more capable of choosing, caring and participating;

• pursue happiness without demanding that life always feel happy;

• seek fulfilment without believing there is one correct way to live;

• bring my actions into closer relationship with what I genuinely value, while remaining open to experience, uncertainty and change;

• learn how to find my bearings without demanding certainty;

• notice the waymarks left by others, leave useful ones of my own, and remain open to wonder along the way.