Attention is all you have. It’s more precious than the stuff people normally chase, like leisure time, money, and status. How you allocate your attention determines the value of everything else.
This is why agency is an essential skill. It’s the exercise of choosing what you pay attention to and when. If your attention flits around like a hummingbird, needling stuff that doesn’t matter, you’ll never quite find your way. Attention paves both your path and the way you experience it.
The modern world is an attention casino. It’s increasingly incentivized and engineered to capture your attention and turn it into money. But every freedom and advantage you have is worthless if you are distracted from leveraging them.
Here’s your antidote: You can have a thought without accepting it. You can feel anger bubbling without becoming angry. You can feel that cord of anxiety tighten without becoming anxious. You can want something without becoming obsessed. You can be distracted, forgive yourself, and bring yourself back to attentiveness.
Your job is to guide your attention so it doesn’t guide you. That’s why the gist of much mindfulness and self-help lore is a bloated refactoring of the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”
To put this into a more repeatable process:
- Observe your thoughts.
- Identify what’s within your control.
- Decide what truly matters.
- Focus on that.
Don’t just do it for yourself. When you can direct your attention to what matters, you become a steadying force for people who matter to you. The ability to stand firm while endless disturbances crash against you is fundamental to bringing presence and continuity to your fragmented world.
“Animals in the wild flee the dangers they see and are tranquil once they have escaped; we, though, are tormented both by what is to come and by what has been.”
~Seneca, Letters on Ethics (Book)
