A Fully-Present Participant in Reality

I’ve been thinking a lot about attention. My attention, primarily, but also our collective attention and where we direct it in the world.

Like time, attention is a finite resource. But unlike time, we can never run out of attention. There is a never-ending supply until we breathe our last breath. The rub with attention, however, is that even though we have an unending supply, we can only ever fully dedicate it to one thing at one time. This creates a distinctly different scarcity from time. Where time has a scarcity of depletion, attention has a scarcity of distribution.

In every moment, we make attention-allocation decisions. These decisions require active engagement with the world around us. Our reality. You can’t save attention for later. You can’t bank it or invest it or set it aside. You can only practice directing it more intentionally in each moment.

Our world is now designed to make these decisions of direction for us. The notification that pulls us away from conversation. The infinite scrolling that captures twenty minutes we didn’t intend to give. The autoplay that queues up the next video before we’ve processed the current one.

Our world has evolved to be hungry for attention. It’s the capital of our modern times. It wants to train our attention into patterns. It wants to colonize the practice of attention itself, to make fragmentation feel normal.

What if we approached attention differently? Not as a resource to be managed or extracted, but as a practice to be cultivated? What if we chose the here and now over the distant and digital? What would change if our attention was not an opportunity to monetize, but an opportunity to be fully here in this moment?

Being fully present means making intentional choices about where attention goes. Let’s choose to pay attention to the things that help us become fully-present participants in our shared reality.