Our Full Attention

I had the pleasure of interviewing Nora Ephron about five years after she had published a collection of personal essays. She was funny and smart and had many interesting things to say about writing and movies and stories in general. After the interview, I walked with her through the bookstore to pass her off to the folks running her event. Small talk seemed in order. “Are you working on another movie?” I asked. “Oh, yeah,” she said wearily. “They always want another one.”

It was the last thing she said to me before we parted ways. I don’t know how much of her weariness was a product of the grind of a book tour or the cancer that would take her a few years later. What I do know is that it had not occurred to me that a person could grow weary at the prospect of having to write and direct yet another major Hollywood movie. The only stories I ever heard about Hollywood and moviemaking and screenwriting were of struggle and triumph. As Ephron pointed out in the interview, movies cost a lot of money to make. They also require a lot people to say, “Yes.” Hear enough of these stories and it can feel as if making a movie requires an alignment of both celebrity and celestial stars.

And yet, as I made my way to my car, I realized I was glad for Ephron’s weariness. It made more sense to me than all those heroic stories of Hollywood success. I do not mean to suggest that life itself is wearisome and that none of our successes are worthy of a little celebration. But dangling in my writer’s imagination was the notion that there existed an Ephron-like level of success beyond which waited only the ceaseless pleasure of creative freedom undampened by the vagaries of other people’s approval.

Meanwhile, in my day-to-day experience, anything – absolutely anything at all – was potentially wearisome. No event, however dramatic, can by itself light the fire of my enthusiasm. The moment I withdraw my full attention, leaving behind just enough to do what needs to be done, or to write what needs to be written, or to climb what needs to be climbed, life becomes a burden to be shouldered against my will. Recall that attention, and I find again that interest is what I bring to an experience, not what I extract from it.