Attention
A common theme in most major religions involves the loss of self through communion with the divine. In Sufism, this is called fanā’ , or “the annihilation of the ego.” The 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi wrote about fanā’ in exquisite metaphors; in this poem, he compared his self to a “clear bead”:
There are no edges to my loving now.... See more
The clear bead at
Arthur C. Brooks • To Get Happier, Make Yourself Smaller
Karl Ove Knausgaard
“All things are full of Time—they are Timeful. The natural world in particular is bursting with backstories—tragedies, comedies, sprawling million-year sagas, chronicles of forgotten empires.
Reconceiving everything, including ourselves, as entities sculpted by time is a perceptual shift that can be transformative on the personal and societal
... See moreThe first half of “doing nothing” is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else. That “something else” is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention. Ultimately, against the placelessness of an optimized life spent online, I
... See moreJenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
“How to undo it now is the question, you know, how to replace acquisition with attention and possession with presence, you know, the way that most humans lived in most places for most of human history?”
- Richard Powers at NYPL
Attention is presence. And presence isn’t just powerful, it can be radical. In a world where attention is monetized, captured, and manipulated - reclaiming it is an act of resistance.
yana yuhai • How to Pay Attention Again
Ritual prevents the ordinary from dissolving into invisibility. If you light a candle at dinner, the meal becomes an event. If you walk at the same time each day, it becomes more than exercise. Anthropologists will tell you that rituals function as technologies of attention: certain ordinary acts aren’t trivial, they’re the architecture of meaning.