About Time, Session 4: Your Attention Please
How we use our attention determines every other choice we make.
This message from my newest paid subscriber, Michael David Martin, was deeply touching and an honor to receive:
Your words ring so true to me. Over and over again you confirm all my best impulses, clarify my understanding of my past, and lead me toward other writers/thinkers who provide their own insights (today it was Victor Frankl). I appreciate your writing very much, as well as your distillations of other works. It all feels like a very generous gift.
Thank you, Michael. I could not be writing and sharing these essays without the support of readers like you.
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This week, Burkeman assists us in our continued exploration of attention and distraction.
Burkeman highlights a crucial resource that should be generously applied to all our endeavors. Without directing our attention, we’d be stuck in a cycle of nihilistic despair and repeated surrender to distraction.
How we use our attention determines every other choice we make.
Burkeman puts it this way: “To describe attention as a ‘resource’ is to subtly misconstrue its centrality in our lives. Most other resources on which we rely as individuals—such as food, money, and electricity—are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while.”
What Burkeman says next should be read very slowly:
Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life.
Burkeman quotes the poet Mary Oliver, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.” So, what are we devoted to?
There are many common themes across what we read at Mindset Shifts U.
But here is the most important one.