How attention changes
A note turned inward: what I look at decides who I become.
I’ve started to suspect that attention isn’t a tool I use, but the material I’m made of. Whatever I attend to long enough slowly becomes my world.
We don’t become what we think. We become what we keep looking at.
The frightening part is that attention can be drained without our noticing — by notifications, by hurry, by the habit of scrolling. Each time, a small piece of the ability to stay-with-one-thing is worn away.
So lately I practice something simple: looking at one thing longer than it takes to see it. A canopy of leaves. A face. A question with no answer yet.