On Attention
As the years pass, I’ve become acutely aware of how valuable attention is to my pursuits, aspirations and personal life. There is an ever present and constant pull to take me away from the hard and meaningful things. Those things that require focus, effort, failure and growth. It has become far too easy to find asylum in mundanity and monotony when confronted with difficulty.
Building things and learning has always been core to my soul. But somewhere, somehow, that began to slip away and I found myself feeling empty. The cause and solution both come circle back to attention and how I unknowingly spend my time. Not just attention being paid to the task at hand or the person I’m talking to, but to recognize when attention itself has shifted.
As you already know, there is a magnetic draw on attention these days. Despite many things in the modern world being an upgrade from our past such as the availability of information, that information has come at a cost. I’ve found that if one is not careful, that cost can be greater than we realize.
YouTube has offered me fresh perspectives, experiences, and stories I would have never come into contact with otherwise. It is a viewport into different ways of life, different countries and cultures, and of ideas that has left a positive impact on myself. But as Bilbo says: You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to. We must be careful not to lose our way. As time passes, I’ve come to realize how important it is to keep my feet. I could blow hours away on YouTube, which can sometimes provide the illusion of progress. But progress requires trial and error, feedback, work, and thought.
One of the things that have helped me do so is mindfulness meditation. Mindfulness, as defined by Sam Harris: is simply a state of open, nonjudgmental, and non-discursive attention to the contents of consciousness, whether pleasant or unpleasant. Cultivating this quality of mind has been shown to modulate pain, mitigate anxiety and depression, improve cognitive function, and even produce changes in gray matter density in regions of the brain related to learning and memory, emotional regulation, and self awareness.
Sitting there, observing thought has shown me how distracted I am and how easily my footing is lost. What moved the needle for me is to realize that if I wasn’t sitting in silence, my attention would have been shifted without my knowing. This happens naturally to everyone, and algorithms are tuned to exploit that fact. Tread defensively, and don’t lose your footing.
This is worth a reflection post in and of itself, but habits are truly the backbone of progress in anyones life. They are the seemingly effortless engine that drive positive and negative changes. Motivation is fleeting, but habits stick around. The key here is to build healthy, positive habits that help make progress toward whatever end you find most meaningful. Be it a health goal or a pursuit, habits need to be cultivated and managed carefully. Atomic Habits lays this out quite well.
In closing, this post is merely a reminder to myself to step back, reflect, keep composure, and to work toward pursuits I find most meaningful. To be mindful, and to continue cultivating positive habits. And to ultimately ensure my time is spent in a way that my future self will be happy with.
