Tuning In

A lunch break after a morning of scientific talks found me sitting by the river and reflecting on what I heard. It was exactly where I needed to be.

I’ve spent more than my fair share of time in scientific meetings and workshops. The schedule of a day and the bones of a presentation are as standard-issue as they come. This is both a convention and a learned conformity. Once, as a young Master’s student, I had an idea to infuse some novelty into a group presentation and was promptly shut down by the professors. So my foray back into the world of a scientific workshop on Monday was not surprising because it has changed.

It was surprising because I have changed.

I arrived at Humboldt University well in time to find the conference room and get some coffee, having dusted off my favorite blazer that doesn’t see much action anymore. I grabbed my name tag, found a seat not too near the front but also not in the last row, tucked my phone in my bag, and pursued the schedule. Open science was on the docket, a topic I have been preaching in the classroom for years. It’s a growing movement towards transparency, replicability, and honesty in research worldwide, and the topics listed for the day included theoretical explorations, empirical findings, finance options, and success stories from across the world. Clearly, this field is tight-knit as people greeted each other warmly and addressed each other by name. The hosts introduced themselves and the topics, highlighting the hard work of the organizers to bring people from far and wide to discuss the future of science practice. They wasted no time in getting started. Right on time, true to German form

I sat back, notebook open, and tried to listen. It wasn't easy. I’m the fidgety kind of smart and the blue sky through the window was taunting me. Some people immediately opened their laptops, and as the talks went on, more and more screens opened in front of me. A few were diligently taking notes, but many more were writing lecture slides, browsing other websites, chatting, or checking emails. The talks plodded along, stark graphs and thematic findings clearly laid bare in black and white. The surest mark of an interesting insight was dozens of audience members whipping out cellphones to take a picture of the slide before the moment moved on.

I have been there. I have been the person checking my email when someone else is sharing their recent work. I have been the person taking photos of slides, certain I will come back to them when the moment strikes.

Honestly, I have forgotten most of the details of what I have seen presented. I haven’t paid full attention to most of the presentations and I have never once referred back to a photo of someone else’s slides. Usually, I only think about these pictures again when Google Photos asks me if I want to clear up memory by deleting unused screenshots.

And before, it didn’t really rattle me. But today, after so many months of not being in an academic space, I was gobsmacked by the sheer number of the exact same photo, most of which will meet the exact same fate. Sucking up storage space until we decide to delete them. A convenient way of signaling our interest despite not necessarily being fully engaged in the moment. A nod that this is something that we find interesting and we will circle back to it if we can just find the time and brain space.

Couple this musing on photographic lip service with the distraction of people on their emails etc. and the distraction of people like me who were distracted by the distracted people around us, and it’s no wonder I got to the lunch break feeling decisively crappy. I had spent 90 minutes listening to people talk--people who are passionate and educated, people who worked hard on their presentations and who were talking about important things--and yet, I had experienced this from a completely new perspective. The muddling I felt was multifaceted and uncomfortable, so naturally, I took a walk.

The meeting was held in Mitte, in Berlin’s historic cultural center. It’s only a short walk to the Museum Island, a UNESCO World Heritage site and cultural treasure in its own right. It was a bright midday, but not particularly warm. I walked and walked, weighing whether I was going to go back to the conference after lunch to pretend to network by standing awkwardly around the coffee table. The museums are all closed on Mondays, so Museum Island wasn’t busy, but there was still some bustle. Tourist groups admiring the old buildings, school groups out for a guided tour, buskers and hustlers out trying to make a buck off of the goodwill tourists, even the occasional Berliner just out for a nice walk. It was the perfect blend of action and peace, and music caught my ear.

I couldn’t tell at first whether what I was hearing was a recording or a live musician. It was percussive and resonant, wending through the columns in a way that made it difficult to place. But it drew clearer as I kept walking--a xylophone maybe, or a glockenspiel, definitely being played live. The sound had the clarity of tone that doesn’t translate through a speaker or an amplifier. I crossed the street to the crowd of people giving away the performance location. Tucked into a corner between the stone wall of the Kolannadenhof and the Friedrichsbrüke, a young man was immersed in playing the hand pan. His dark hair was tightly curled, and didn’t bob on its own as his body followed his music. He was a master at work, completely consumed by the tonality, rhythm and timbre of his music.

I was rapt.

I leaned against a wall, experiencing his music in my whole body and momentarily forgetting to breathe. At one point, after striking a final chord, he picked his head up and startled at the size of the crowd watching him. He blushed, snuck a sip of water, and dove right back in. He played passionately, without a predictable tune or a score, masterfully blending tempos and harmonies. Before I knew it, 20 minutes had passed. I tossed a few Euro--all I had on me--in his meager coffer and kept walking.

It was a moment of duality and clarity, painted across two different worlds. One I have known professionally for many years and one I am rediscovering as I dive deeper into who I am and how I want to spend my time. I have spent so long feeling funneled into a productive and prolific career that is technical at its core, but there are parts of that which no longer fit me. It’s not just that I couldn’t focus there, it’s that the entire field and culture is one of divided attention, where we are expected to give and be and do all the things except for maybe those that fill us up the most. It is a disconnection between the time spent on various prescribed actions and the time spent reflecting on what these things actually mean in reality and how the human spirit is nurtured along the way.

There are lots of great quotes out there about attention, attributed to a variety of people but all saying generally the same thing, that our attention matters more than anything else we can give. Our time and our money and our skills and our resources are all divisible and multiplicative. We can try to focus on multiple things, we can outsource and delegate and buy the assistance we need. But when we think about our attention as our focused and purest expression of being, we truly all do have the same 24 hours in a day. And we can certainly choose to divide that: to try to maximize efficiency or productivity or to sneak in quick tasks when we think we’ll go unnoticed. We also often abdicate, letting tech companies and advertising campaigns run roughshod over how we allocate our attention, dividing it up and scrapping for the largest cuts. We can also take control of it. We can get out in the world, unplug from our devices and take notice of what catches us. Then we have the beautiful and too-often ignored opportunity to lean into asking ourselves what we can learn from that moment, that snag in our most precious commodity.

I learned a lot more from the handpan player perched outside the museum than I did from the morning I spent with a lot of PhDs. That’s not an indictment of the people who were sharing their work and exploring their interest, nor is it an indictment of me. I am unfolding years of assumptions, forced attention, and inability to see myself through the expectations of the world around me.

I went home that day and let loose. I laid my frustrations and thoughts bare in a bit of an impassioned soapbox that Chris indulged. And the next day, I sat down and I wrote a job application for an academic job. But I took a decisively different approach. Instead of laying out my sterile but impressive CV in my cover letter, I took an opportunity to tell my story. My current passions, my focus and frustrations and the ways in which my personal and professional endeavors have always been intertwined. The lab claims they’re looking for innovation--at the nexus of science and society--and I aim to show them that I can and will do both.

It remains to be seen how it goes. I will either impress them or horrify them, but I’m tired of sitting still and pretending like the status quo of divided attention and persona shifting is a solution. I’ve committed to showing up as my whole self.

And I will never listen to handpan the same way again.