Regional Care Coops need narrow and wide attention
In her book ‘A Life of One’s Own’ Marion Milner describes her attempt to “decide what [her] aim in life was … I found that I had no idea…”
Given the disparity of views we read whenever RCC is discussed it is highly likely we have no consesus of what makes RCC, what it does, how; etc.
It’s an important subject to discuss in view of the idea of regional care coops.
Maybe we can start to get to a shared understanding by not defining role and purpose for RCC but finding a method for us all to find what we think?
Milner considers two kinds of attention; “narrow attention” and “wide attention”.
Narrow attention.
An automatic everyday attention … (with) a narrow focus that selects what serves its immediate interests and ignores the rest, blind to what is wider. Serving a purpose, a means to an end
Wide attention.
There is no need to select one item to look at rather than another. Looking at the whole something magic happens, here is ‘a quality of delight completely unknown to the first kind’.
Wide attention reenchants the world, provides akternatives; narrow attention can diminish by overdefining
What Milner is describing here as wide attention is a form of attention purged of aims and wants and conventional satisfactions.
Narrow attention is already part of a project.
With wide attention there can be no knowing beforehand what one wants.
Milner gives us 2 ways of looking. She thinks we need both. Currently we have narrow but not wider.
Milner encourages us to extend or repertoire. The Care Review was a narrow view from all available wider views.
Care has always been about ‘straddling contradictions’ (Empson).
As Adam Phillips observed recently- you can’t get the boon and benefit of a contradiction by taking sides