attention
So, it’s very easy not to know north from south because it all looks the same, the ice and the overcast sky. And he said, “Well, you know, it’s just now,” he might have been in his fifties, “it’s just now that I think I begin to understand the ice.” And he’d been living there all his life. Then he said, “And now I’m really too old to hunt.”
Security Check - Orion Magazine
Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter. Such openness and empathy M. had in abundance, and gave away freely... I was in my late twenties and early thirties, and well filled with a sense of my own thoughts, my own presence. I was eager to address the worl... See more
Maria Popova • Mary Oliver on What Attention Really Means and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate
“An act of pure attention, if you are capable of it, will bring its own answer,”
Maria Popova • How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love
from the writer Howard Rheingold: “Attention is a limited resource, so pay attention to where you pay attention.”
nytimes.com • Opinion | Michael Goldhaber, the Cassandra of the Internet Age - The New York Times
Availability is no longer determined by one’s time, but by one’s attention. The problem, of course, is that our attention is constantly absorbed by the tools we use everyday, making us feel like we’re never truly available. As these tools continue to get nicer, prettier, and more powerful, it becomes increasingly difficult to stop checking them, wh... See more
Lawrence Yeo • The Omnipresence of Work - More To That
"When everything is readily available and consumable, contemplative attention is impossible." (Byung-Chal Han, Vita Contemplativa)
The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
Farnam Street • This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)
But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Farnam Street • This is Water by David Foster Wallace (Full Transcript and Audio)
learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.