attention on Focus

On a walking pilgrimage to Assisi in Italy, the writer Patricia Hampl began to make a list in answer to the question, What is prayer? She wrote down a few words. Praise. Gratitude. Begging/pleading/cu...

Since you cannot do good to all, you are to pay special attention to those who, by the accidents of time, or place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you.

Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. …[human attention...

Sustained attention is the easier, the richer in acquisitions and the fresher and more original the mind. In such minds, subjects bud and sprout and grow. At every moment, they please by a new consequ...

To pray is to pay attention to something or someone other oneself. Whenever a man so concentrates his attention-on a landscape, a poem, a geometrical problem, an idol, or the True God-that he complete...

When I fully enter time’s swift current, enter into the current moment with the weight of all my attention, I slow the torrent with the weight of me all here.

Presence is experienced as a unitary whole. Think, for example, about the experience of sitting on the top of a hill, far from the polluting lights of a city, gazing at a dark, starry sky. Unless you ...

I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.

My thought it is a wanton ranger,  It skips away;  I fear 'twill bring my soul in danger  On Judgment Day...

In this short poem, the psychologist Daniel Goleman (the developer of the concept of Emotional Intelligence (E.Q.)) builds on the work of R. D. Laing’s “knots.” The poem is a helpful reminder that our...

Two theaters compete for our gaze: the theater of sin on earth and the theater of glory where Christ is.

I recently watched a children’s movie (Extinct, 2021) with my kids. To be fair, it probably will not receive any Academy consideration, but it was enjoyable. The story revolves around a pair of extrem...

Cue a terrifying trend: our attention span is dropping with each passing year. In 2000, before the digital revolution, it was twelve seconds, so it’s not exactly like we had a lot of wiggle room. But ...

In June 2024, I (A. J.) had the opportunity to visit the Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem, Oregon, to meet with a group of inmates who had read one of my recent books. The experience was...

Have you ever wondered the impact noise can have on our cognitive ability? Psychologist Arlene Bronzaft was curious to find out. Studying Public School 98 on the northern tip of Manhattan, Bronzaft fo...

You decide to buy a certain kind of car, and suddenly you see it everywhere. A friend recommends an obscure movie to you, and by the end of the week, three more people have mentioned it. You find out ...

A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its...

Peter Ustinov, the British actor, director, and playwright, once received an indignant letter from the headmaster of his son’s school. The letter complained that his son frequently disrupted lessons b...

Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator. It asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.

Last year I joined the growing ranks of people who have made the return to music on vinyl. There is much debate in my family as to whether I’m a hipster or will soon be eating dinner at 4 p.m. and wea...

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

The American philosopher and psychologist William James once defined human attention as a “withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opp...

Compassion begins with attention.

We ignore so much stuff for a simple reason: if we didn’t, we’d quickly be overwhelmed, our brains flooded until they seized up. Depending on the kind of information, it takes our brains some amount o...

There is a secret for greater self-control, the science points to one thing: the power of paying attention.

For all our time and attention, no matter how carefully we curate our stuff or how much we might enjoy ourselves along the way, we’re all merely stocking and staging someone else’s opportunity for bar...

The simple act of paying attention can take you a long way.

All you have to do is to pay attention; lessons always arrive when you are ready.

It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.