Wednesday, March 5, 2025
When you fine-tune attention, you’ll realize the quality of life goes up. If you notice yourself focus, you’ll learn multitasking is nothing but flitting from one thing to the next. I’d encourage you to focus to the point where attentiveness is the point.
If you focus on eating, you’ll notice how multi-sensory it is. It’s pretty intense – the textures, the smells, the flavors. Have you ever taken the time to notice how visual it is as well? Eating in and of itself is complex, but it’s often missed by chitchat, TV watching, or scrolling. But I think “the world” is much smaller than we perceive it to be. Truthfully, it’s so small it vanishes.
Attention can be so refined that there comes a point where doer and doing become integrated. In other words, whatever you are focused on, you are. If you are lost in thought, you’re thinking. That’s a singular activity that overshadows the many other things we do in a day.
For years, I wrecked my shoulder doing bench press until my very smart trainer noticed a slight glitch in my wrist position. We worked on other technical details of refinement, and now bench press is a cinch and quite pleasurable. The pain makes me focus. It’s a guardrail – and so is obesity, boredom, and depression for that matter.
If you focus, especially when it hurts, you’ll notice detail. You’ll notice your inattentiveness has much to do with it. You’ll know how much idle chit chat you’ve got going on in your brain, tugging you out into the far reaches of the past and future. You’ll notice you can’t sit still, or do one thing at a time. If you pay attention, you’ll begin to notice the world is tiny and that living is easier than you once thought it was. Sometimes, figuring out how pleasurable life is is about refinement of attention.