Attention in practice · 01—12
Twelve small ways to notice more, strengthen local relationships and act with others.
Choose an actionBefore you begin
It can change how we travel, eat, repair, share, listen and take part in public life. None of these actions will change a whole system by itself. Their value lies in what they help us notice, the relationships they build and what they help people do together.
Make room for contribution, reciprocity and shared work.
Invite a few people to share a meal. Ask each person to bring what they can: food, help with preparation or time to clean up.
A potluck invites everyone to help create the gathering. It creates space for conversation, generosity and shared responsibility.
Introduce yourself to someone nearby. If it feels comfortable, exchange contact details and talk about one small way you could help each other.
Knowing who can check in, lend a tool or share useful information helps a neighbourhood respond when circumstances change.
Take part in a working bee, community garden, repair café, neighbourhood clean-up or another shared local project.
Do something alongside other people, rather than simply doing something for them.
Notice what our daily choices depend on—and what else is possible.
Once a week, walk, cycle or use public transport for a trip you might otherwise make by car, where this is practical for you.
Notice the distance, time, safety and infrastructure involved. The journey can reveal both our dependence on fossil energy and what makes other forms of transport easier or harder.
Before replacing one item, see whether it can be repaired, borrowed or shared.
Notice what makes repair easy or difficult, and which tools, skills or services are available locally.
Make a meal using at least one locally or seasonally produced ingredient. Find out who grew or made it, and where.
This small act reconnects food with land, season, work and place.
Make the often-invisible systems beneath everyday life more visible.
Choose one system you use every day: water, electricity, wastewater or rubbish. Find out where it comes from, who maintains it, where it goes and what it depends on.
The aim is not to become an expert. It is to make an often-invisible part of everyday life visible.
Visit the same nearby outdoor place once a month. Notice the water, plants, birds, soil, weather and human activity. Record one thing that has changed.
Repeated attention helps a place become more than a backdrop to daily life.
Learn one useful skill: mending, growing, preserving food, first aid, bicycle repair, facilitation or something else that matters where you live. Then show someone else.
Knowledge held by many people is harder to lose.
Move from private concern towards shared understanding and action.
Read the agenda or minutes of a community board, council or local organisation. Choose one decision that affects your area and follow what happens next.
Notice who takes part, what information is used and how the decision is carried out.
Choose one public promise, policy or project. Look for the plan, funding, responsible organisation, timeframe and way progress will be measured. Return to it later and see what happened.
An announcement tells us what someone hopes or intends to do. Implementation tells us whether it can become real.
Speak with someone whose experience of an issue differs from your own. Ask what they think people are missing. Listen without preparing your response while they speak.
The purpose is not to agree on everything. It is to understand more than you did before.
What fits your life right now?
Pay attention to what the action makes visible, not only what it achieves. Then tell someone what you learned or invite them to join you.
Return to action 01The ideas beneath the actions
These actions are interpretations, not instructions taken directly from the thinkers. They translate larger ideas into small experiments that can be tried in ordinary life.
Illich used conviviality to describe tools and institutions that people can understand, shape and use together. It is not simply friendliness. It is about people being active contributors rather than passive recipients.
Start with Tools for ConvivialityFressoz challenges the comforting story that societies simply move from one energy source to another. His work asks us to look directly at continuing fossil-fuel dependence and the material demands behind claims of transition.
Start with More and More and MoreSmil examines the enormous flows of energy and materials that support modern life. His work encourages us to test attractive claims against physical scale, infrastructure and what can actually be delivered.
Start with How the World Really WorksHamant contrasts maximum performance with robustness. Living systems cope with change by keeping variety, more than one way of doing things, room to adapt and some spare capacity—even when these appear inefficient.
Start with The Benefits of ImperfectionParrique questions the assumption that producing and consuming more will solve social and ecological problems. His work asks how economies can meet needs fairly while using less energy and fewer materials.
Start with Slow Down or DieWahl asks how the way we live can be shaped by local ecology, relationships and the particular conditions of a place. His work is concerned with creating cultures that help life flourish rather than wear it down.
Start with Designing Regenerative CulturesSmaje explores how societies might organise more of everyday life around small-scale farming, local economies, practical skills, agricultural diversity and shared responsibility for land.
Start with A Small Farm FutureHine invites us to question familiar stories of control, certainty and progress. His work makes room for grief, uncertainty and the possibility that paying attention begins with admitting what we do not know.
Start with At Work in the RuinsCommoning is what people do when they care for a shared resource, agree how it can be used and take responsibility for it together. That resource might be a garden, kitchen, collection of tools, meeting place or shared knowledge.
Not all the knowledge behind this list belongs to named writers. It is also shaped by lived practices of mutual aid, community organising, shared provision and care for whenua in Aotearoa.
Follow the twelve-part series
Paying Closer Attention will explore the idea behind each action, what it can reveal and how it connects to the larger systems shaping everyday life.
Visit payingcloserattention.comPaying Closer Attention is the invitation.
Collective attention is the practice.
Public clarity is a possible outcome.
Responsible participation is what follows.