The shaping tool

# Chapter 316

Our attention shapes our entire experience in the world. What we choose to view, see, read, research, believe, adhere to, love, and spend our time doing, is the full result of what we will experience as we live our lives. Even the events that are forced upon us, how and to what extent we give them attention will largely determine our experience of and with those imposed events that we did not seek out. The quality and consistency of our attention is a shaping tool, it frames and molds and designs our experience, especially the intensity of our experience.

This is how we love, care, develop, engage, learn, find insights, explore, investigate and decide. Attention is the central, albeit underlying, driving factor to all these pieces of our experience in the world. Undivided attention is perhaps one of the rarest gifts in the modern age. When was the last time you were having a conversation with someone without an iPhone between you? That constant instigator of endless interruptions and breaker of all focus. Or have you ever been to someone’s home for a visit and they don’t turn the TV off?? Shesh! But these are just big major examples. One of the most common sentence structures I hear every day in my life is, “did you see that YouTube video where . . . ?” I don’t watch YouTube videos not because I don’t like them (how would I know I like them or not) but because I don’t have TIME to watch them because my ATTENTION is elsewhere. Yours should be too.