Your attention is one of the most valuable things you possess, which is why everyone wants to steal it from you. First you must protect it, and then you must point it in the right direction.
As they say in the movies, ‘Careful where you point that thing!’
What you choose to pay attention to is the stuff your life and work will be made of.Austin Kleon, Keep Going
I ran across that quote from Austin Kleon the other day, and it really struck me. The man knows what he’s talking about. (He really does. Go buy his books.)
In our world today, it’s become more and more important to point our attention in the right direction. If we don’t intentionally point it at what we want to pay attention to, it’ll be pointed for us, by an attention economy that is extremely expert at making us look where it wants us to look.
And what we pay attention to will fill our whole vision. If all, or most, of what we pay attention to is what’s bad in the world or in our life, pretty soon that becomes our life. It’ll be all we see. The world is a bad place to be, “they” are out to get people like “us”, everything is awful, and we spend our time wallowing in misery.
It’s not that there’s not plenty of bad stuff out there—there is. Or that there aren’t undesirable things happening in our lives—there are.
But listen to the language: paying attention. Spending time.
Because that’s exactly what it is. I have a finite amount of attention and time available. If I use up that attention and time on negativity, on things I dislike and disagree with, on matters that are bad and I can’t do anything about, that time and attention is gone. Poof. Kaputt. I no longer have it available to spend on the things that really matter.
What do I really want to spend the precious coin of my time on? What do I want to pay attention to?
“Do you want to be happy? Be grateful!” says Brother David Steindl-Rast of grateful.org. He’s not talking about “looking on the bright side”, or “trying to find the silver lining in the cloud”, let alone “shutting our eyes to what is painful and ugly and evil”. No, this is about attention: the attention to the surprise and wonder that surround us, every day, no matter where we are.
And I, for one, want to cultivate that kind of grateful attention. I don’t want to be miserable, thank you very much. Over and over I make the choice (at some times more successfully than at others) to spend my attention on the things that really matter, that matter to me. And once I’ve paid that attention, I find I have none left to spend on those other things, the ones that “they” want me to pay out my attention for and that make me upset and angry and depressed. Those things are still there, but I don’t have time for them; I already spent it all.
And that’s just fine with me.
“What you choose to pay attention to is the stuff your life and work will be made of.”
Life, the Universe, and Paying Attention. I want to choose my spending wisely.