Around 4:54 this afternoon Lucian froze on a lizard.
it was a small one, the kind that lives in the cracks of the patio, the kind we have stopped seeing because it has been there since we moved in. lucian had not stopped seeing it. he stopped at it. no reach. no noise. no glance back at me to check that i was watching. the rest of the house kept moving around him. beck was finishing up in the kitchen. the dryer was running. i was halfway through closing a tab. he did not move for a long time.
he is thirteen months & thirty one days. i have seen him stare at things before. the ceiling fan when he was new. his hands at four months. the spinning toy he caught last week. this was a different kind of staring. the staring was not exploration. the staring was company. the lizard had his attention in a way that did not require anything from him.
i watched the back of his head for the length of time it took to register that nobody had taught him to do this. nobody had said sit still. nobody had said look at one thing for as long as it is interesting. nobody had built a small piece of curriculum to lengthen his attention. it was already there. the part of him that could stay was a thing he had brought with him.
the rest of the house was earning the floor he was standing on. dishes. laundry. a codebase open on the patio. these are the kinds of small motions a household needs. the room under his stillness was made by everyone else's small movements. i do not think he was registering that. i think he was just with the lizard.
there is a version of this i could have broken. i could have called beck out to see. i could have raised my phone & framed the angle. i could have narrated what he was doing back to him in the voice we use when we want him to know what he is doing is worth noticing. any of those moves would have made the looking into a small performance. it would have stopped being his attention & started being a clip.
i kept my hands where they were. i let him have the lizard.
the part of the room nobody was watching for was the part of his face. there was no eyebrow raise. no smile he was checking with me. no little body adjustment for an audience. just a boy & a small creature & a quiet that was already complete.
in an economy organized around performance, this is the strange asset. the part of him that can be with something without showing anyone is the part that does not have a price yet. attention without an audience is rare in adults because adults have been rewarded for the version that has an audience. the room is full of small social receipts for the public version of looking. there are very few receipts for the version where nobody is watching back.
i was thinking about this while the laundry finished its cycle. the agents are going to take more of what i used to do with my hands. they are going to take more of what i used to do with my mouth. drafts. emails. plans. small acts of coordination. there is more of that available to a parent now than there was a year ago. some of it is good. some of it gives me the space to sit on a patio at five o'clock with my son & a lizard.
what i do not want the system to take is the part where nobody is watching. the part of him that can stay with a thing without being seen staying with it. the part of me that can let him stay with a thing without making it into something we did together for the camera. the unbroken version of his attention is something that has to be allowed to keep being his. it is not something i can give him. it is something i can refuse to interrupt.
there are going to be very few rooms in his life where nobody is watching. screens are designed to convert his looking into someone else's data. classrooms are designed to convert his looking into someone else's assessment. apps are designed to convert his looking into someone else's revenue. the small patio with the lizard was a room where his looking was just his.
the rooms where his attention belongs to him are going to get rarer. the rooms where it gets converted are going to get cheaper to enter. that asymmetry is the inheritance i did not see coming until a few minutes ago, on a patio, behind my own kid.
he eventually broke the moment himself. the lizard moved. he turned to look at me with the look that asks who saw that with him. i nodded. i did not say anything. that part was for both of us.
What I am holding onto
the attention was already in him. nobody taught him to stay. my job is not to add the staying. my job is not to break it for a clip.
the rooms where his looking belongs to him are going to get rarer. the small ones we have now are worth protecting more than i was protecting them this afternoon.
the version of being-with that has no audience is the version that holds. anything i film of it is a different thing than what was happening. i would rather not have the clip than spend the moment getting it.
Cheers, JanCarlos
if this landed, hit reply & tell me about a room in your week where your looking is still just yours.