Inner and Outer Life

Tag: intentions

Point Your Camera to the World

In fact, tape away the self-pointing lens.

Change the focus from the Self and to the World, and then let the world teach you.

As writer John O’Donohue notes,

Love begins with paying attention to others, with an act of gracious self-forgetting. This is the condition in which we grow.
(From Anam Cara, p. 28).

When we take pictures of ourselves, our cognitive resources are channelled towards ourselves. The big trade-off when we become self-absorbed, we miss opportunities for what the world can teach us.

In virtual video meetings, once you’ve checked you are in the frame, it pays off to turn off the self-view. It is cognitively taxing to see yourself when you are supposed to pay attention to the other, as you would in face to face conversations.

Take pictures or videos of the world outside, and–is is the important bit–pay attention.

Take this as a metaphor to live by. Pay attention to the people and the world outside, and the make the picture good.

Time Management vs. Attention Management

We are in desperate need of attention management. Not of others, but of our own. Corporate society thrives at captivating our attention. In many sense, your attention has more currency that money.

Maybe it’s not time that we have to manage directly. Time moves at a constant, regardless of our approval. Time is experienced differently depending on how you navigate this moving terrain.

It’s not time management that we need, but attention management.

Mindfulness has been all the rage in this period of writing. This has been associated with the notion of “being present.” Yet, intention precludes attention. We can only enter the cracks of mindfulness through the seeds of our intention. In another way of putting it, our intentions can only take shape when we do a bit of “time travel” into our future, so that paradoxically, we can eb more present.

The closer we live our lives based on our intentions, the better well spent our time is, the better our wellbeing.

This calls for a form of intentional living. Not going through life “by default,” but “by design.” A design that is shaped by your choices, within the constraints of givens and circumstances.

Design is not just for aesthetic, “beautification or prettification” reasons. Designing something is to cultivate an environment that is conducive for our intentions to flourish.

Our experience of life is truly where our attention is. If left to a default mode, our attention is compelled to act like a suspectible scatter-brain, easily sucked into the cesspool of clickbaits, autoplay videos, and algorithmic “recommendations.”

We need to take the steering wheel. We need to craft, redirect and steer our senses towards where we want to go.

Why bother with such deliberation? Because that is where you will be. Our attention leads us moment by moment into a personal future, and you are the only one who will experience this one life.

© 2024 Full Circles

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑