Attentive and Awake: a simple way to check your pulse

Is it possible to be too awake? The question seems absurd. After all, we wouldn’t chastise a man for being really awake during the day time. Nevertheless, many people seem bent on surviving life by dropping into a self-induced coma. So much so, that there are some who seem to us a bit overzealous because they seem too attentive. People like G.K. Chesterton, Augustine, and Bonaventure make us tired just thinking about how alert they were to life, nature, and the activity of God in His story. Why don’t they lighten up? Relax a little. Won’t they suffer some kind of spiritual retina damage by straining to see so much?

The truly wakeful person has an imaginative advantage over most of us.

The wakeful man sees life differently. He sees life brim full of opportunity and sees God as a mystery worthy to be sleuthed. We grow weary of life and weary of the mystery precisely when he is getting warmed up for the hunt. He grows more awake while we grow more sleepy and that makes him, in some respects, even more alive than us. The truly alive man is not a man who sleeps through life. He’s attentive.

That’s one reason why Alan Jacobs praised C.S. Lewis and called us to imitate his “omnivorous attentiveness.” An omnivorously attentive person is aware of the brisk air on his lungs, the firmness, wetness, warmness, and realness of his surroundings. More than that, an omnivorously attentive person embraces the awe that such realness should induce. John Piper described this awe well when he said, “To be amazed that the water is wet. It did not have to be wet. If there were no such thing as water, and one day someone showed it to you, you would simply be astonished… He [Lewis] helped me to see what is there in the world–things which if we didn’t have them, we would pay a million dollars to have, but having them, ignore. He convicts me of my callous inability to enjoy God’s daily gifts.”

We need omnivorously attentive people like Lewis in our lives to remind us of what we are missing while we sleep-walk. God is at work in a real, beautiful way every day, all day. We need omnivorously attentive people to help us become more alive to life. Chesterton was a brother to Lewis in this regard. He put it this way:

“Do not let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it
learns to see the startling facts that run across the landscape as clear as a painted face. Let us be
ocular athletes” (from Tremendous Trifles).

Ocular athletes. Omnivorous attentiveness. What strong, driven, eager phrases and what a high calling!

Is such a lifestyle difficult? I suppose. Waking up is hard work to the dude who is asleep. But to the man who’s awake, it’s just what he does. I have a feeling that if we practiced omnivorous attentiveness, we’d get better at it and we wouldn’t find it a chore; instead, we’d find it exhilarating. We’d become ocular athletes because we practiced to become ocular athletes. We might grow a little bit manic, like Sherlock Holmes when he’s throwing on his coat just before the chase begins, but there’s something magnetic about a person like that.

Honestly, that’s the kind of person I’d like to be around. It’s the kind of person I want to be. So, please, do me a favor. If you catch me sleep-walking through life, give me a swift kick in the “posterior caboose.” I’ll thank you for it and I might even give you a tip for the service.