Actively Attentive
"Life's not worth living if we are not paying attention to it." Me paraphrasing Nadia Boulanger
At the start of the last school year I decided that I wanted to have an overview of my spendings. This in itself was a great plan because tracking spendings showed me clearly what I spent my money on. At first I thought I would do it for a single month but once that was done I decided to keep going because it was quite an easy task. Basically after every spending I wrote down in my notes how much I spent on what. I afterwards synthesised my spendings into my notion financial tracker. In there I separated my spendings into 4 major categories: Groceries/Food, Subscriptions, Utilities, Entertainment.
It sounds like a meticulous task to organise the spendings into those four categories and to be honest it was. I speak in the past tense because after about ten and a half months of tracking I decided to stop it this month. A tracker shows the happenings, the actual actions taken in a certain time span. The utility of it is to then be able to analyse those actions and to find the patterns which can be broken or encouraged. My problem was that I did not act on it. I was just tracking for the sake of tracking. I did not try to be more conscious about how I spent my money, for some reason the fact that I was tracking my spendings reassured me that I was on the right path. I had the illusion of being productive, but it was just that, an illusion.
This is a perfect example of brainlessly following a routine. Routines can take us very far in life but if we are not mindful of where they are taking us we just might end up in the wrong place. Here's a quote from Nadia Boulanger which illustrates perfectly what I fell prey to:
"Anyone who acts without paying attention to what he is doing is wasting his life. I'd go so far as to say life is denied by lack of attention, whether it be to cleaning windows or trying to write a masterpiece."
Being attentive is difficult and of course it is not sustainable to be attentive during all waking hours. Nevertheless we should try as much as possible to be attentive with the things we truly do care about. Doing some reflection on what you value as a person can help you figure it out. For some helpful information about values you should check out my blog post What To Value in which I break down the 10 basic human values. Personally I will try to be more attentive in all aspects of life because Nadia Boulanger has got a point – life's not worth living if we are not paying attention to it.
This Week's Suggestions:
🎶"Lady (Hear Me Tonight)" by Modjo:
This song is a mellow summer song that for some reason is nostalgic for me. This is peculiar because I did not listen to it when I was younger, I only started listening to it this year. The song has been out for 21 years at this point and it's still got people going back to it, probably for a good reason.
In this video Ali Abdaal gives a few ways to spend your money in a way to maximise your own happiness. Spoiler alert – that new car or phone or any other material object might not be it.
See You next week!
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