Slowing down in the moment
This is my second attempt to post a blog entry only using voice recognition on my phone. Hopefully it will also be successful. Last time seemed to go well. I will ask you to bear with me if there are any weird typos related to autofill. There are so many moments in our day when something small and useful, perhaps even vital, definitely efficient, seems like a big deal. Ultimately, we don’t have an accurate understanding of what attention is. The ability to do the unpreferred thing that feels tedious boring or overwhelming. That is attention. Just as much as sitting down and paying attention to a lecture in college is attention. But those little things happen all day everyday. When you get change at the convenience store do you take time to put it in your wallet or just jam it into your purse for the pocket of whatever jacket you’re wearing? When you bring the mail in, do weed out the junk mail and put it right in the recycling? Do you have a convenient place near the door to put the mail? Or do you just throw it on the dining room table with all the other mail until it becomes a pile that’s so overwhelming you don’t want to deal with it? After you make dinner, if you don’t feel like doing the dishes, do you leave the leftovers so that they’re gross and unusable the next morning when you get around to the dishes? Or do you take 2 minutes to put them in a tupperware so you can have them for lunch the next day? I’m not looking to shame anyone here if you’re doing the non-optimal behavior. And you’ll note that I’m not even framing it as a choice. We have years of…