Pay Attention.

In my last article, Is This Your Purpose, I shared that you are both the tree and the gardener, which naturally raises the question:

How then do I cultivate my nature?

I would argue that your attention is your most valuable asset

Which is why everything is competing for it. You pay with attention. 

Technology is increasingly evolving to master the art of keeping hold of it, and as a result we are evolving to be increasingly poor at holding it ourselves.

Why is attention so important?

Where our attention is, is what we are in attendance of.

What we are attending is what we are experiencing.

Therefore,

What we get to experience is a result of where attention goes.

Where our attention goes, our energy flows, things grow.

In simple terms, imagine you have two peace lily plants. One in one bedroom, one in another.

If one gets your attention, you will attend to it, it will be watered, it will flourish.

The one that you do not attend to will wilt and die.

Not only does attention dictate what we experience, and what we nourish by attending, but it also dictates the very character that we become.

In any given moment, there is an almost infinite amount of things that we could be in attendance of.

Right now, for example, you are reading this.

But you could be watching a billion other things on YouTube, walking in nature, speaking to someone you love, or simply sitting in silence.

So how do we determine, from the infinite sea of possibility, 

What gets our attention?

We do so through the values that we are living through.

To place our attention on one thing above another is to prioritise.

Our priorities result from an evaluation.

An attribution of value.

An e-value-ation.

What we have prioritised, we attend to and therefore act upon.

Our consistent actions form our behaviours.

Our behaviours form our character.

This then leaves us with an even deeper question.

How do we determine value?

And if our values determine what receives our attention, perhaps understanding our values is one of the most important things we can do.

We'll explore that in the next article:

This Is a Priority.

Until the next time,

With peace and love,

Alex