Have you been paying attention?

 

“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are” ~Jose Ortega y Gasset

We understand it. Intuitively and even more powerfully through experience, the profound truth of it.

The whole range of human experience is available to us at all times. What we attend to shapes us and ultimately defines us.

But what determines what we attend to? Who or what’s driving this process?

George Bernard Shaw once said “People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I don’t believe in circumstances.”

There’s comfort in the notion of circumstances. Maybe even freedom. Freedom to be a passenger.

But there’s also driving. Forking left instead of right. Speeding up and slowing down…on purpose. Being responsible for those choices. Communicating what’s important to us by those choices.

What you pay attention to defines who you are, what you see and what you experience. Pay attention to beauty and you’ll see it. Pay attention to relationships and they flourish.  Pay attention to the present moment and it expands.

“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it. (21)”~ Thích Nhất Hạnh

There are few more powerful means of communicating that someone or something is valuable to you than the attention you pay.

No matter how careful we are with it, our attention is a limited, in any given moment, in any given day, in any given person’s life. We can allow circumstances and distractions to take it from us.

What we need to imagine and better still harness the power we have to shape ours and others’ life by choosing who and what we attend to.

“Whenever she turned her steep focus to me, I felt the warmth that flowers must feel when they bloom through the snow, under the first concentrated rays of the sun.”  ~Janet Fitch, White Oleander