Paying Attention
I came to Wisconsin with the habits of harder places still fixed in me. My attention had been forged into a shield. I scanned every crowd, measured every crossing, braced against every interruption. At the end of the day I was drained from holding that posture.
This place offered something different. The lakes widened my gaze. Trees leaned into the streets with patient gestures. The horizon curved in a way that eased me before I could put words to it. Here, attention was not pulled from me. It was given space to rest.
In that rest I began to notice what had once slipped past. The slow drift of light across water. Snow reshaping the familiar into something briefly strange. The quiet of dusk when the air folds into itself and nothing presses for response. These were small things, but together they gathered into a lesson.
Not all is stillness. At times I feel the intensity of others around me, tightly held and carefully hidden. Smiles that mask fatigue.
Voices carrying a weight they do not name. When those currents reach me, I reverberate with them. The shock is not that stress exists, but that it is so often buried beneath calm surfaces.
Madison has given me both of these truths. The calm that draws my attention outward, and the unseen turbulence that passes through me when I least expect it.
Paying attention here means welcoming both. It means letting the visible and the hidden sit side by side. That willingness is the quiet gift this place has taught me.
Addition: in Madison the leaders talk and talk and talk and talk and suddenly there’s a weird decision made behind closed doors that makes no sense. This is at the personal, school, legislative and national level.