Attention is the beginning of devotion.

The exterior of a building is no different from the interior, in this respect — the two pass into each other through the windows. Rooms with windows on only one side are rooms that have given up on the day. People do not stay in such a room, and they do not begin a conversation in it; they wait in it, the way one waits in a hallway, for something to take them somewhere else.

For ten years we measured. In Marin and in Modesto and in the railroad rooms of Pasadena where my grandmother had lived; on the Calabrian coast and in a Welsh slate-roofed cottage and twice in the small chamber off the kitchen of an inn outside Kyoto where the light fell at four in the afternoon through a window the size of a folded shirt and another, opposite, the size of a small letter. The rooms in which we found people lingering — talking, reading, falling silent — were almost without exception rooms with light coming in from two sides. The rooms we hurried through, or that visitors politely passed by, had a window on one wall only.

This is, of course, not because two-sided light makes a room beautiful — though it does. It is because a room with light on two sides escapes the tyranny of a single direction. A person, sitting, has a relationship to the day. The day moves past her, not at her. The shadows turn on the floor as the morning turns into afternoon. The book she is reading turns to face the better light without her noticing she has moved.

The job of design is to make decisions for the user that the user shouldn't have to think about. — a note in the margin, from Maya, 21 April

One must distinguish a pattern from a rule. A rule belongs to a code; a pattern belongs to a life. The rule says install windows on two adjacent walls. The pattern says, if you want a room in which a friend will sit for an hour without remarking on the time, see that the day enters from two sides, and let the rest follow. This second sentence — quieter, slower — is the one that builds a city.

We have come to think of attention as a thing one pays — as if attention were a coin, a currency that one parts with in order to receive a thing called experience in return. The metaphor is so domesticated by now that we forget how strange it is. Attention is not a coin. Attention is the ground out of which everything else grows. It is the first condition. Without devotion, there is nothing. Attention without feeling is only a report.

Mary Oliver, who knew this and said it more plainly than most, taught the children — and meant by the children not children but us, whoever we have happened to become — to look closely at the daisy and the pale hepatica, to taste sassafras, to spend a morning on the bank of a creek doing nothing but watching the water move stones around. She did not say this because she wanted to make small naturalists of us. She said it because she could not see how a person who had not learned to look at one small thing could learn to love anything large.

A pattern, then, is a kind of attention made into a wall, a window, a corner. The job of the designer — the patient designer, the slow one, the one who has read Alexander twice — is to lay these attentions down quietly, so that a person in the room can be at home in it without having to think about it. The room makes its decisions on the reader's behalf. The reader is freed to think about something else. About a sentence, perhaps; or about a friend who has not yet arrived; or about nothing at all, which is sometimes the best thing to think about.

The pattern as it stands in the book is brief. It runs no longer than two pages. It does not argue; it merely notices, and offers itself to anyone who would like, in their own small room, to begin paying attention to the sides of the day. Most of the patterns in this book are like that. A pattern language is not a recipe. It is a way of paying attention, written down, so that other people can pay attention with it.