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Burning Attention
We are all fuel. We are born, and we burn, some of us more quickly than others. There are different kinds of combustion. But not to burn, never to catch fire at all, that would be a sad life, wouldn’t it?
— Graham Swift
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When you recognize that there is a voice in your head that pretends to be you and never stops speaking, you are awakening out of your unconscious identification with the stream of thinking…you realize that who you are is not the voice… but the one who is aware of it.
— Marc Certo
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If uncertainty is unacceptable to you, it turns into fear. If it is acceptable, it turns into increased aliveness, alertness and creativity.
— Eckhart Tolle
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What is attention? The French thinker Simone Weil, who made this question the heart of her philosophy, answers: attention is the ability to wait. A wait not resigned, but active, intense, alert…
The only thing that should be taught in school, Weil provocatively recommends, is just to pay attention. An exercise of logic or philosophy, math or literature, are just different ways to exercise attention. First, resist all the temptations to “want to know too fast”: instant judgment, automatic positioning, the use of labels and stereotypes…
