Paying Attention

Weekly wisdom to level up your creative life in 3 minutes, for free.

A SHORT STORY

This past week, I had the privilege of teaching a Shakespeare workshop for 1,100 cadets at West Point alongside some incredible artists.

As teachers, we kept asking ourselves: How do we meet these soldiers where they are? How do we speak to their value system while passing on our knowledge of Shakespeare?

Standing before 150–200 cadets at a time, I kept returning to the idea of attention. These cadets commanded me to pay attention as a teacher, in the same way Shakespeare paid unwavering attention to everything around him.

Halfway through the workshop, I began asking them: What does it mean to stand at attention? To take an oath? To stand by one’s words?

In their junior year, these cadets take an Oath of Affirmation to protect their country. And in many ways, I realized they had more to teach me than I could teach them.

As I reflected on this with them, It struck me that identity is not something we hold, but something we meet again and again in the depth of our attention. It is not a fixed thing, bound by belief, but a conversation with the world, shaped by what we choose to notice, what we lean into, what we allow to shape us in return.

Ancient traditions have always known this: that to attend deeply is to be drawn deeper into the current of life itself. And in that depth of attention, we are set free.

Watching these cadets, I understood something more clearly: attention isn’t passive. It’s an act of devotion, a discipline, a way of orienting ourselves in the world.

And maybe, just maybe, it’s the foundation of true freedom.

The very thing they take an oath to protect.

What are you paying attention to in your life right now? And what is that revealing to you?

A POEM

“Everything is Waiting for You” by David Whyte

Your great mistake is to act the drama
 as if you were alone. As if life
 were a progressive and cunning crime
 with no witness to the tiny hidden
 transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
 the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
 even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
 the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
 out your solo voice. You must note
 the way the soap dish enables you,
 or the window latch grants you freedom.
 Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
 The stairs are your mentor of things
 to come, the doors have always been there
 to frighten you and invite you,
 and the tiny speaker in the phone
 is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
 conversation. The kettle is singing
 even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
 have left their arrogant aloofness and
 seen the good in you at last. All the birds
 and creatures of the world are unutterably
 themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

Grateful,

Michael