Your nervous system runs on stories—ones you didn't consciously write.
Long before you had words or even clear memories, your body began crafting its first manual for navigating life. Each time your earliest caregivers shifted their gaze away, each unanswered cry etched another line into your operating instructions. Without realizing it, you handed the authorship of your emotional and attentional life over to a toddler—a younger version of yourself who couldn't yet speak, yet whose voice still dictates your deepest reactions, expectations, and anxieties.
But here’s the good news:
The manual is still being written, and the pen is within your reach.
Attentional Poetics is your practice of reclaiming authorship. It’s learning to see attention not as a passive reaction, but as an active, creative stance toward your world. By consciously shifting how and where you pay attention, you rewrite the instructions, shaping your experience in real-time—bringing clarity where there was confusion, peace where there was anxiety, and meaning where there was emptiness.
Attentional Poetics invites you to name, craft, and embody new attentional states—building your own personal vocabulary of attention, tailored uniquely to your history, your heart, and your everyday life. This isn't abstract philosophy or traditional therapy; it’s poetry in motion, using language, story, and awareness to remap your emotional landscape and reclaim your inner authority.
Because you don't have to live forever under the authorship of an overwhelmed child. Your nervous system is waiting right now for your permission, your poetry, and your voice.
Pick up your pen—
your body already knows the words.
These stories represent examples of how you can populate your own. If you do read, I’d appreciate a little sender’s respect—so maybe start with that card—because it’s not how it’s written, but how well it recalls your own felt experience. Attention is the art — poetics is the method.
A sacred orientation of awe toward anyone brave enough to send—to point their skis, their soul, or their story downhill, despite wobble or fear. It’s the ethic of nonjudgmental reverence for effort in motion.
A few years back, my boys were still early in their skiing lives—quick learners, but not far removed from their own first, tentative sends. From the lift one day, they saw a large, visibly struggling man set off down a slope. One of their friends made a snide comment. I paused, then said something like, “Hey, any time someone points their skis downhill in bravery—no matter how wobbly—they’re sending it, and that deserves respect.” I don’t think they got it, but it’s the ethic of the studio. We honor the wobble.
When grief doesn't demand collapse, but becomes texture. Sadness made quiet and reverent—like breath on a windowpane. It’s where you feel the ache and the beauty, at the same time.
Just over a year ago my 10 year old and I fell in love with table tennis and joined the only club in town where everyone there was so much better than us, but also so nice and welcoming, that we rarely missed the weekly Friday night tournaments. It’s a wonderful community that we quickly became part of and now my son plays competitively. It just closed. Abruptly. When I first heard the news I was so upset. I tried going into sublimated sadness by using chronesthetic attention--sorry for all the made up words; you’re not even supposed to learn them, but make up your own--which is a kind of time reframing, think future-nostalgia, and I thought of what I would think of the club, even this moment, 10 years from now and was overcome with feelings of gratitude for that place and what it brought to the both of us. Yes to the grief and sadness of the occasion, but they hit differently when sitting next to so much gratitude.
The cultivated love for the chaotic, boisterous noises of children—especially your own. Not tolerance. A re-attuned listening where screeches become symphonies, and disorder is recast as evidence of aliveness.
A few Saturdays ago, we were stuck in some serious canyon traffic thanks to the previous night’s snowfall, and my boys, screenless, started playing this game with each other that included some poking and the occasional, jarring, screeching noise from one or the other. At first, the noise grated. But then I listened again--beneath the screeching was laughter, improvisation, and joy. I turned up the radio and smiled. I never had this kind of bond with my brother. And now, in this cramped car, my sons had created a small universe of play. That sound doesn’t hit as chaos anymore, but as cacofilia--the glorious racket of love in motion.
The tight, scanning attention that arrives in moments of perceived social threat. It doesn’t just observe—it surveils. Often a relic from early emotional environments where safety was performance-based.
This mode is awful, but that’s why giving them your own silly names works--it helps pull you up from them. I journal with an LLM and when I first built the attention taxonomy it was encouraging me to try and see if I should shift states on the fly. One day, driving home after therapy with my ex I caught myself in this mode then brushed it aside. A couple minutes later I was worrying about an anticipated response to an email I had sent and found myself in hypervigilant self-watch again. This time I tried looking at it from a different mode--curious playfulness--and was surprised to find that I could, easily, and that it actually felt different. I wasn’t avoiding the situation, just looking at it from a different, healthier lens. One that I could select from because it was already embedded in both body and story for me.
When attention becomes worship, without needing a god. A moment so perfectly itself, it doesn't need enhancement—just presence.
I went up to the Bird today and it was one of those days where it was sunny and clear in the valley (and Snowbird is only like 8 miles up the canyon) but snowing at the Bird. About halfway up the canyon large snowflakes began to fall as I entered into the darkness of the approaching clouds. Those clouds, contrasted by the clarity below, and these enormous white flakes pulled me up and I felt like I was entering a portal into heaven. The moment stayed with me and as soon as my skis hit the snow from the lift the anticipation of the descent, the felt presence of being, made me realize I was in heaven…heavening in heaven, in fact.
The only other person who can scroll through your child’s life—with the same ache, joy, panic, pride, and deep-time tenderness as you.
My son’s table tennis club shut down which was a pretty big deal and not ten seconds after hearing the news my ex was on the phone with her realtor asking how much it was to lease warehouse space and inventing a plan where I would office from there and we’d just start a new one. Only she would receive that news the way I did, and I’m grateful to have someone to share that kind of news with. Perhaps not a soul mate…definitely a scrollmate.
A mode of attention that attunes to the beauty, form, and quiet detail of a moment—not to fix it or change it, but to see it as if for the first time.
I went for a hike today, still in aesthetic witnessing mode, and was expecting peaceful/pristine but noticed a sort of ominous feeling so I went with it and saw in the mountain the wonderful tension between the seasons at play. The trail was warm and dusty in places and further up wet and snow covered in others. There was almost violence to it. The trees revealed winter's decay and the grass was trying to spring. But I knew there'd be at least one more snowstorm coming through and it felt like I was walking on the future graves of Spring's first offerings. The hike was wonderful, replenishing as they always are...heavening for sure.
Time-bending attention. When you look at now from the eyes of your past self, future self, or the version of you no longer afraid. Turns memory and imagination into emotional tools.
This is really helpful. It's when you borrow the eyes of your future self—or your past self—to see now a little differently. It’s future-nostalgia, it’s past-witnessing, it’s what lets you shift the emotional weight of a moment without needing the moment itself to change.
The other week, my 12 year old was golfing with friends that day and asked if we could go hit an early bucket. He’s just starting to prefer friend-time to dad-time, which is right, but I can feel the shift coming. It was a beautiful, dewy spring morning and I thought of myself looking back on the moment ten years from now and how grateful I was for it. Chronesthetic attention doesn’t fix anything. It just folds time a little, so you can hold more of the moment while you still have it.
The attentional mode where the stakes are lowered and the spark is raised. It’s the joyful improvisor in your nervous system—open-eyed, mischief-ready, and allergic to certainty. It doesn’t need answers—it wants to poke the moment, see what wriggles, and maybe name it something new.
This mode is often a gateway out of other negative modes because it invites humor and is the easiest for me to slip into as I had a childhood friend who was a genius playful inventiveness. I had just gone through a breakup—not a big one, but it still left a bruise. He called, heard it in my voice, and said he knew exactly what we needed: break-up soup. That alone made me laugh. But then he actually picked me up and drove us across town to a restaurant I’d never been to in an area we never went. The soup was hilariously bad--I couldn’t believe it was being sold as food. We laughed so hard and vowed not to leave until we finished. It wasn’t a distraction from sadness—it held the sadness, reframed it, and added a glimmer of absurdity that made it more bearable. Somehow more mine.
A strategic, heart-forward offering of exaggerated warmth at the very start of an interaction—especially where tension, mistrust, or old conflict might otherwise dominate. It’s not fake; it’s preemptive kindness, designed to co-regulate both parties before any defenses can rise.
When I interact with my ex I’ve learned that the first few seconds of a conversation matter immensely. If the opening is tense, the whole exchange tightens. But if I front-load warmth, even in an exaggerated way, it signals her own safe modes of attention. A bright, “Hey Buddy!” when I walk in the room makes a huge difference. And even if it’s the fifth time she’s called that day, answering with a cheerful, “Hi friend!” is always the right move.