Saved by Alex Dobrenko and
Attention is an Art Form
Contemplative space is hard to define. Contemplation is generally not a practice that offers immediate jolts of anything. There’s (well, usually) no chatty/ethery response from on high, no neatly cleared path unfurling after a good long think. In fact, more often it feels like “nothing” at all is happening in that open space. The “soft” characteris... See more
Lia Purpura • The Ecology of Attention
“What I need, what I am trying to build, is — I coin this phrase by analogy to a memory palace — an attention cottage . ... When I sit down in a chair with a book in my lap, a notebook at my side, and no screens within reach or sight, I am dwelling in my attention cottage.
The great artists and thinkers cultivate a systolic/diastolic rhythm, tension... See more
Alan Jacobs • 1, #86 - How to survive in a world of distraction
“to hone sensory receptivity to the marvelous specificity of things.” I would argue that this is another way of talking about learning to pay a certain kind of attention to the world. In so doing we may find, as Andrew Wyeth once commented about a work of Albrecht Dürer’s, that “the mundane, observed, became the romantic”— or, the enchanted.
L. M. Sacasas • If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention
Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.