Pay Attention

Every Day Encouragement (17/365)

I am NOT paying attention.

I’m a flibberty-gibbet. Concentration flickering this way and that.

Gathering the snippets. The quotes; the articles; images … ideas scribbled in notebooks … books half-read … those articles, half written … the quotes and ideas, still buried in those notebooks.

The attention span of a … what?

There’s that phrase “the attention span of a goldfish”. Reputedly, goldfish focus for 9 seconds … yep, that’s why they swim away shortly after you tap on their bowl because you’re desperate to distract them; part of your own distraction, perhaps?

So, they are pretty bad, those goldfish. Listen to me, fish face, you’re not concentrating, I hear you say.

So, the average human in this digitised world … you guessed, 8 seconds. Eight seconds. You are paying attention less than a goldfish! And, when I say you, I mean ME … all those quotes and ideas and scribbles and half-finished ‘everythings’ … that’s me, being distracted.

PAY ATTENTION …

It is time we all started diving a bit deeper … switching off the digital distractions … picking up — and finishing — those books … turning the ideas into actions … sharing the quotes … making the scribbles into sentences, and the sentences into articles. But you are going to have to focus for a few moments; concentrate for a little longer than 8 measly seconds.

Like now.

I just did it. I switched off my phone, took the idea I wrote down when I got back from my run, and I wrote something. This.

Perhaps if I paid attention, I’d get a lot more done.

Every Day Encouragement is a side project of feastsandfables Encouraging words, written and shared every day for 2021.