Zen-ish Thoughts About Patient Attention

When most people try to meditate, they find that their mind refuses to enter the clam, quiet, thought-free, serene state that they think characterizes meditation.

Very often when we try to listen to someone else, we find that our mind refuses to stay focused on what they are saying, how the are saying it, what it means to them, what they want to get across, what they are trying to achieve in speaking, who they are, …

When we try to achieve something, or wait for someone else to achieve something, or just wait for a traffic light to change, we find our mind wishing for things to rush along quickly.

All of these things and infinitely more are times when our best course of action, our best state of mind, is to be in a state of patient attention. Patient attention is public enemy #1 of our culture.

Paying patient attention allows time to notice that you don't need the product being advertized. Paying patient attention, you might notice that you have no reason to compete with hardly anyone, and should be cooperating, helping, or at least doing no harm. Paying patient attention to someone is the only way to know who they are, which is a requirement to love who they are, and essential to making them feel loved, and for them to feel worthy of love. Paying patient attention allows time to be a critical thinker in response to political claims, policies, actions, and consequences. Paying patient attention is the opposite of what your employer wants you to do. Paying patient attention is the antithesis of the hustle culture that dominates our times. Paying patient attention is the opposite direction of contemporary TV shows, movies, video games, or playing on your smartphone every time you have 20 minutes, or 2 minutes, or 15 seconds when you have to wait for something.

If you wish for a single concept that has the immense power to transform your entire experience of your own life, if you want to be deeper, more deeply at peace, more emotionally intelligent, more logically analytical, more effective, begin with slowing down, calming down, and engaging with everything with patient attention. Actually paying attention to life instead of flying over it at breakneck speed is the essence of actually having a life, and not just a lifetime of empty years. We tend to miss the majority of our life by succumbing to the abundance of internal and external pressures to "get on with it" in the most not-mindful way possible. Be a rebel – pay patient attention to your life, to your experience, to other people, to ideas, to feelings, to events, one partial minute at a time. It's the only way to have a life.