attention
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.
David Foster Wallace • This is Water
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
the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.
This is Water - Alumni Bulletin - Kenyon College
DFW ‘this is water’
"When everything is readily available and consumable, contemplative attention is impossible." (Byung-Chal Han, Vita Contemplativa)
“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
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,... See more
Lawrence Yeo • The Omnipresence of Work - More To That
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant... See more
This is Water - Alumni Bulletin - Kenyon College
Understanding comes only when we let go of our self and allow the other to grab our full attention. In order for the reality of the other’s self to fully invest us, we must first divest ourselves of our own selves.
Robert Zaretsky • Simone Weil’s Radical Conception of Attention
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.