In the Sun Magazine they have a section where they give a word or two and you write about it. This month it was called Paying Attention.
“Whenever my husband talks to his mother, brother or sister – on the phone or in person he sits down. This irritates me because I wish he would multi-task. It also makes me jealous because I wish I came from a family of people who gave each other their full attention.”
“My father traveled a lot on business and left the raising of my sisters and me to our mother. A consummate multi-tasker, she’d pack meat for the freezer while helping one of us compose a school report. In the middle of talking to us, she’d trail off: “Get me the…” The radio or TV was usually on, tuned into a talk show...” Gigi Maniscalchi Edwards
Paying attention to me meant if you could keep all the things going, you were paying attention. Little did I know that I wasn’t paying attention to any of them, but just snagging bits and pieces of each.
This fragmented view of life is what I was raised with, your focus was never fully intent on one item, behind each thing you were doing, was a background noise of a half a dozen more.
In a large family there is always something going on or something to be done, there never seemed the time to stop and pay attention.
Even as I raised my own children, I didn’t stop to pay attention fully and intently on each child and their conversation…I was juggling too many items in each moment of time.
I am getting better at paying attention and focusing on one task at a time, and I can feel my body get anxious when there is too many things going on at once. And I feel the distracted attention when speaking to someone who is doing things while we talk.
I prefer the game of one on one, where there is only one ball in the air at a time.
How sad for my children to be tossed in the air with dishes, clothes, cooking, and things; where my fragment attention was all they ever got.
My self was one of the things that got lost in the shuffle as well, and I have been learning to slow life down to now start paying attention to each part of me.
Here is another writing on attention that caught mine...
“The other graduate students and I at the University of North Dakota drank a lot of coffee. Whoever drained the last few drops from the thirty-five cup coffee maker would discard the used grounds and, using a long handle brush that we found on the wall in men’s restroom, scrub the inside of the percolator.
We were satisfied with how this system was working until the day someone saw the janitor cleaning urinals with the brush.” Lowell Wandke
