Many of us are craving change right now.

Change in political leadership.
Change in our healthcare system.
Change in policing.
And a break from 90+ degree weather.

But I’m going to argue something unpopular. I don’t think change is within our circle of control.

From years of sitting meditation I’ve come to believe that movements, thoughts, even decisions our not made by ‘us.’

Sam Harris proposes an interesting thought experiment to investigate this.
Try to conjure up in your mind your three favorite movies.
Okay, now pick your favorite among these three.

How did you do this? Did ‘you’ make the choice? Or did it just occur to ‘you’? Are you merely the overseer of such choices, telling yourself the story that you were in charge?

Run the experiment again. Pick three different movies. Choose a favorite. Where were YOU in the process?

He would argue that thought, speech, and actions are pre-determined. Or, as my zen teacher says it, an endless chain of cause and effect. We are in the midst of these cause and effect reactions, so we tell ourselves the story that each fork in the road is a choice made by us. We take credit for change.

If we pivot from the mystical zen world into the more trustworthy domain of cognitive psychology we see similar ideas represented in different ways.

Our decisions and actions are governed by entrenched sets of habits and keystone habits. Our memories are selective, biased, and rewrite themselves every time they are recalled. Our consciousness is propped up by a ridiculous number of unconscious functions in the body, all of which chug along second by second without our help at all.

One of those unconscious functions is pattern recognition which leads to instant, unconscious, automatic, fast, emotional, intuitive thinking, or ‘System 1’ in Daniel Kahneman’s terminology. Every idea that pops into our mind is merely a product of patterns collected over the course of our lifetime (or cause and effect). System 1 is constantly pulling in information and updating a personal world view based on collected data. System 1 is in charge of flashing the answer to 2+2 into your mind. System 1 would rather refute information than be surprised by it.

System 2 on the other hand is slow, rational, deliberate thinking which is surprised by nearly everything. It is in charge of figuring the answer to 217 divided by 11. The solution to that math problem will surprise many of us. As you can probably tell, System 2 thinking requires way more effort and we are therefore far less likely to use it. Interestingly, the way humans have found to circumnavigate the effort of to use System 2 is to develop routines we follow to force ourselves through the tough thinking process. For example, airlines require pilots to go through an established checklist of safety measures before flying. In other words, we set up a routine cause and effect process in which we closely pay attention.

So whether we are using reflexive thoughts (system 1) or deliberate thoughts (system 2) to navigate our environment, cause and effect, not choice, is dictating the process.

One thing we also know from physics is that observation has an impact on what is observed. Known as the observer effect (link) and similar to the uncertainty principle (link), merely measuring a phenomena is known to change the nature of the phenomena measured. A simple example of this is when you measure the air pressure of a tire some of the air must be released which changes the pressure of tire upon measurement. Heisenberg acknowledged, famously, that when we use photons (the smallest measurement of light) to detect/measure quanta their slight interference causes these small particles to act differently upon measurement. [If you find this intriguing you might like Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time where he argues that time is an emergent phenomena resulting entirely from our unique perception of the world.]

So all of this science speak is to say…. When we zoom in, or pay attention, to the events flowing through our life they have a peculiar way of changing.

I have adopted Joshua Waitzkin’s view of the world as frames. When something looks mystical or extraordinary it is because the performer is able to view the world through more frames than the observer. For example, a magician is able to perform a cool magic trick because they can move in the spaces between an observers’ frame-work of the world. Martial artists and entrepreneurs are able to strike ‘in between’ other people’s conception of reality because they have zoomed in on life. They are moving at the same pace as the rest of us, but that pace is being applied to (from our perspective) a micro-unit of reality.

When we zoom in on life we bring our cause and effect chain to bear on more and more frames, which will inevitably change the course of our life.

This can be explained through the example of a smoker. Say a lifelong smoker wants to quit. They’ve tried changing their habits many times– drugs, programs, sheer willpower hasn’t changed a thing. The habitual cause and effect they’ve been subjected to for years continues to pull them to smoking. One day, instead of going through the motions of the day they start to take note of exactly WHEN the urge to smoke arises in their mind. The next day they decide to write down the exact times in a notebook. They still allow themselves to smoke just like normal, but now the attentive noting accompanies the smoke. The next day they start to pay careful attention to what their hand does when preparing to smoke. How they pull the cigarettes and lighter from their pocket, how they reflexively flick open the carton, which fingers pull out the cigarette, and how the thumb rolls over the lighter. The more they pay attention, the more they might realize that smoking was a nearly unconscious activity. They actually used smoking as a way to zoom out of life, not zoom in. The more they zoom in, or pay attention, the more frames are available for them to opt out of smoking. Whereas before the urge was a singular on ramp to smoke, now there are hundreds of moments for the urge not to smoke to arise if it does (naturally through cause and effect, of course).

This process of zooming in, creating frames, and paying attention can be leveraged to work on any of the above ‘issues’ in our society. I might argue that, like smoking, our president, healthcare, racial inequality, and relationship to weather has arisen from zooming out in an attention deficit culture.

I believe one of the best ways to practice paying attention is in the violin lesson. Every time we use attention to reshape posture, correct intonation, and shape musical phrases we strengthen their ability to zoom in on the moment, especially when it is uncomfortable or painful. Rather than take credit for change, they learn to track with and pay attention to the most painful/difficult/friction-full moments.

This paying attention training allows me to teach violin daily with the conviction that what we do can, and just might, change politics, healthcare, and injustice. Just don’t miss an opportunity to pay attention to each student, each lesson, every day.