A question that has the potential to change my life: what am I attending to? It’s similar to the question of prioritization—“what am I doing next?”. But there’s a reframing less around output and what completion looks like, and more about posture, focus, presence.

I had been reading about the neural network model called Transformers—the “T” in “ChatGPT”—and how the fundamental building block is a trainable attention mechanism, basically giving the model the ability to focus in on certain parts of its computation. The original Transformers paper, titled “Attention is All You Need” (2017), showed that simply stacking attention layers ended up outperforming more complex designs that had been proposed.

The decisions of what we attend to day-by-day are going to end up shaping our lives. A newsletter email helped me connect my scientific reading of attention with what it means to live faithfully before God.

Ragan Sutterfield on Birding, interviewed by Jen Pollock Michel

As you lay out in the book, birding is an attentional practice. How are spiritual practices attentional practices—and attentional practices also spiritual ones?

The first time I clued into this connection was by reading Simone Weil’s essay, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” She says there that prayer consists of attention, and because of that, anything that can help strengthen our attention can be an aid to prayer. Weil offers studying math or a foreign language as her examples, but birds, for me, are a more inviting subject.

Attention, in its root meanings, is literally “to stretch toward.” There’s a sense of desire and attachment, of a longing for communion inherent in the act of attention. That is what the spiritual life is all about—the desire for God, a longing to be with God and to welcome God’s being with us. If we follow attention’s “stretch toward” all the way, no matter the object, then I think we’ll always end up at God.