Paying Attention

In the spirit of hitting our 111 milestone of Dynamis Drops, this month we’re bringing back our “greatest hits” of the past! Enjoy this drop originally published on July 7, 2022.

When’s the last time you had blurry vision? Perhaps it was reading the eye chart at your latest optometrist appointment, this morning before you put in your contacts, during your last migraine episode or worse after your noggin lost a battle with an object! Whatever the case, we cringe with you because blurry vision is the worst.

And yet too many of us live with a version of blurry vision every day. Our vision, near and far, is blurred because there is a huge volume of information coming at us every waking moment. Whether it’s advertising onslaught, traffic commotion, the 24-hour news cycle, people’s demands, over-scheduled kids or social media notifications, it’s easy to become overstimulated, and then blurry!

The problem with this is the volume of information reaches a point in becoming too much and fogs up our ability to focus. We’re created to only handle so much, the rest gets lost, and we lose ourselves in it. Not only that, but we lose the opportunity to focus on other people, which is such a critical aspect of living generously. To be generous requires something very simple and practical before anything else: to pay attention.

The ability to “pay attention” is a basic human faculty and one of the gifts of being human. To give attention is to take notice of someone or something. Being attentive is one of the best things we can do for ourselves, and others. It used to be that time management was coached as the way to live most effectively. It’s not so much the case anymore. These days, it’s managing our attention, not our time, that is more important.

By clearing out distractions and giving our attention to the right things, we can become centered in God, discern right from wrong and know our true feelings. We can also notice people’s needs and make a bigger impact with our lives. This is where paying attention is necessary for being generous. Sometimes people’s needs are obvious, other times not so much. If we don’t see the needs of others around us, it limits the reach of our generosity.

Listening to people is essential to loving others, understanding their needs and acting generously toward them. Sometimes, by listening intently we realize the spoken need is not the real need; we might discern something entirely different. Many times, we’ll even discover that genuinely listening to someone is the way to meet their need. They just want to be heard and not feel so alone. In this way, our attentiveness to their person is the most generous thing we can do by showing them how much they matter.

The saying is so true: What has your attention, has you. What has your attention these days? Is it the things that are most deserving of this valuable resource within yourself, or is it just a bunch of gibberish? Maybe it’s time for clearing out some distractions that are keeping you being at your best and being generously present to others.