Simone Weil’s Radical Conception of Attention
Normally, when we pay attention to someone or something, we undertake what Weil calls a “muscular effort”: our eyes lock on another’s eyes, our expressions reflect the proper response, and our bodies shift in relation to the object to which we are paying attention. This kind of attention flourishes in therapists’ offices, business schools, and fune
... See moreRobert Zaretsky • The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas
Illich and Cayley each has just as much attention as they need in the moment. The joy of their conversation, the resonance of their encounter, to borrow another formulation, may tacitly derive from the sense that there is nothing else to which they ought to be giving their attention in that moment because their attention is ordered toward the good ... See more
L. M. Sacasas • Your Attention Is Not a Resource
Attention means bringing something or someone into focus so it is no longer blurred by the projections of your own ego;
David Richo • How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving
As with any form of exercise that aims to train and strengthen, the proper exercise of our faculty of attention requires resistance. It is like an obstacle course we are asked to run, but it is a peculiar kind of course. Not only are the obstacles our fellow human beings, but they are also obstacles we have spent our lives learning not to see.
Robert Zaretsky • The Subversive Simone Weil: A Life in Five Ideas
‘We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will…Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer. If we turn our mind towards the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.’ Sim
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