The Power of Attention

Weekly wisdom to bring your home in 3 minutes, for free.

A SHORT STORY

This week, I'm back at West Point teaching the cadets Shakespeare. It also happens to coincide with the one year anniversary of the death of my father.

I chose to return again this year because it feels symbolic to be in that room, since my dad and his father were both soldiers. Being at West Point places me in a living lineage. I also chose to return because this room feels different from my other teaching spaces.

There is, in particular, the reality of teaching Shakespeare to a group of cadets. The moments that challenge me most are when the reality of their lives makes itself known to me, when I consider where those hearts, minds, and bodies will find themselves in a few years’ time, and the circumstances they may well be facing. The emphasis on attention in their lives feels immediate and tangible.

It has me reflecting on the power of attention and what I might pass on to them in our short time together.

It also makes me think of a story my grandfather, who flew bombers in World War II, once told me about and how attention saved his life.

He was flying over the Atlantic when the electronics in his cockpit shorted out, leaving him with no way to guide himself back home. Alone in the dark, he heard a small voice, in the form of his mother, telling him to "pay attention." In that moment, he realized he was heading in the wrong direction. The wake of a boat, visible only because the lights were out, became his pathway home.

That story has never left me.

To me, attention is a form of prayer, an act of devotion to what is before us.

And so, my week with the Plebes (freshman cadets) reminds me of this. It reminds me that how and where we place our attention may be the most important skill anyone can cultivate. It shapes not only how we see the world, but how we move through it, and ultimately, who we become.

Where in your life are you being asked to pay closer attention?

A POEM

“What to Remember When Waking” by David Whyte

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

Grateful,

Michael