The more I consider it, the more I realize that attention, properly directed, is the solution to many of our difficulties.
We tend to underrate the value of the simple act of attention, but I assure you that Madison Avenue and political propagandists do not.
After all, as the philosopher Alan Watts once observed, “The ego is nothing other than the focus of conscious attention.”
And the poet Mary Oliver advised, “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.”
Merely momentarily shift your attention from your driving to your phone, for example, and a child may die. This isn’t a metaphor, but a memory. The driver was a teenage girl, and the child was an 8-year-old boy.