Saturday, October 11, 2025
Can I have your undivided attention?
It puzzles me to think we might have the ability to “divide” attention. To me, attention is a blob. It can “seep” into one thing or another, but it isn’t cutoff, not entirely sliceable. It seems like huge swaths of bandwidth are taken up by the activity in the skull, while the rest is dimmed. You may be driving, but so consumed in thought, you’re “dimly” present at the wheel, on the road, and with your surroundings. But enough attention is on driving to get you safely to your destination.
If you could sincerely divide attention, wouldn’t you leave the body? What about coming to your senses? Is that attention “in” the body? Can you smell, touch, hear, see, and taste at the same time? When you’re thinking, those senses are there, but diminished. They’re in the background. So this blob of attention seems to be able to expand, shrink, come and go, and in some cases focus immensely as to seemingly “cut off” the other senses. You could close your eyes, sniff a rose, and “get lost” in the fragrance. Smell would be so heightened, it might be the only thing. Is your attention divided in that case?
Separation is a kind of hiding or blindspot. What you see as “others” in this world is you hiding, in the same way as your “other” senses hide when you take in a huge whiff of a rose. You’re not dividing – just being blinded by how focused attention can be.
Now, expand. Make the blob go everywhere. Don’t let the mind take up all the bandwidth. This expansion might be thought of as omnipresence. It’s not multitasking. That’s just attention moving rapidly from one thing to the next.
Now, can I have your undivided attention? It’s always indivisible. Attention is everywhere. Always “on.”