Attention Is Not Neutral

Pay attention to evil, and you feed evil.

I am surrounded this week by attention thieves.

Well-meaning loved ones are pushing me to devote more of my time and energy and reach to “fighting evil”. They want me to pay attention to all the bad things that are happening in the country and the world, and to push back.

At the same time, someone close to me is facing a medical issue that strikes right at the heart of what he and I both fear.

Both of these circumstances conspire to steal my attention away from what matters most to me: finding wiser solutions to the challenges that face us, rather than investing all my time fighting what I don’t want to happen.

You don’t get what you want by wishing for the opposite of what you don’t want. You will not find love by saying over and over, “I don’t want to be lonely anymore.”

You find love by opening your heart and allowing your energy to attract others. Focus on what you want. Nothing else.

I’m guessing that most people have never asked themselves, “What is the highest thing I could give my attention to?” But that’s exactly what we need.

This sentence stopped me in my tracks tonight (if you really need to, you can search to find its source). "We appear to be approaching a threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences."

Yes.

Let’s grow wiser. Not accidentally, but intentionally. Not some of us, but all of us. That’s a noble and necessary goal, one that is much, much better than running away from fear or constantly giving our attention to the biggest, dumbest, and most hideous among us.

We don’t have 100,000 years to evolve. We have months or a few years. All our attention should be devoted to this goal, so that we can make better decisions and see more clearly what needs to be seen.