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Attention

It all turns around. A day that begins with the hardest wish against a workday reality turns in two hours to the shorelines of paradise. A night of subpar sleep, of wishes for a needed holiday, half because I squandered my weekend, half because I'm hassled by two longstanding, burrowing thoughts. I woke with the simple wish to be away, and now all is fine, upbeat, accepted. What's the difference? Attention. That's all. How often we hear the old adage, "wait and see -- things will turn out all right." Lives have been wasted and saved according to this advice, because the real substance that turns the tables isn't time itself but what our minds' eyes set upon.

We are made for movement, but first our eyes must be properly focused. The matter of good living is first a matter of right attention. Attention is coded in different ways: phenomenological experience, ideas, filtered through beliefs, values, goals. Now we're into the territory of cognitive therapy, which reformulates the thousands-year-old wisdom of Epictetus, a Greek slave with a crystalline mind: "people are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of them." The vast majority of our waking lives we walk around talking to ourselves. Not externally, but internally -- psychotherapy jargon clips these words as automatic thoughts. The twist is that we often treat these self-stated words as if they're reality, and the vast majority of the constellation of souls haven't once disputed them with the rare exception of a friend who "changed my mind." A person remembers a difficult assignment and secretly says to himself, "impossible!" and so his feelings are anxiety, hopelessness, frustration. A twin in a parallel universe views the same situation and automatically thinks to himself, "unfortunate! But I'll manage," and feels a tinge of regret for having to sacrifice a planned free time activity. The responses that code our perception determine our emotional and psychological health. That's the tagline of the most empirically supported and widely used form of psychotherapy in history.

What was I thinking just hours previous, warm in bed, eyes stinging with poor sleep as the alarm rattled off? I was awfulizing necessity, dreary and damning the universe for existing as it does on Monday mornings. Work and rising from bed at an early hour had to come, but instead of an adaptation response of acceptance, I rebelled against gravity. Again, good living is a matter first of right attention, and in times when the outer world is immovable we always have the freedom to determine which attitude we will hold. Viktor Frankl called this freedom our "attitudinal value", and he learned it in the worst setting in world history: Auschwitz, naked and cold with the condemned bodies excoriated by a nation caught on a dream of superiority. He knew the secret: you always have the power to change your mind in any situation.

A person is as he does, and attention is a verb. We like to divide action from thought because we think that only the external, the measurable, the perceptible, is real. But the very core of human freedom begins with the direction of our consciousness; consciousness itself is willing-towards plus the senses. As we attend, so we live. There is no small accident in the New Testament's call to be transformed by the renewing of your mind (Romans 12:2). It's the mind that encodes and filters our experiences. The very words you secretly say to yourself determine the emotional output of whatever scene you find yourself in, from rage at an offhand comment to saintlike acceptance in the face of a crowd of contemptuous smiles.

What are you saying right now?