The Most Precious Resource in the World
© 2004 by Gordon Davidson

     What is the one resource that is so precious that people spend millions trying to obtain it?  What is the commodity for which competition is more intense than anything in the world?  What is more valuable than gold to those who seek it, and brings the highest price in the marketplace? Corporations crave it, executives vie for it, children cry for it, teenagers die for it, lovers pine for it and politicians lie for it.

    Yet this resource is totally yours to give or to withhold in every moment. It is democratically distributed, as it is given at birth to each person in the world. It is potentially under your total control, but you, (not realizing its value), may have given it away, and yet you can always take it back. You may use this resource unconsciously, and you may not be aware of its importance, but those who want it will grab it if they can.

     This most precious of all resources is your attention—what you focus on and allow to enter the range of your awareness.  In today’s modern world, vast armies of people labor to capture what seems to be in very short supply. And we all seem to feel a lack of enough attention to go around. We give a dash of attention to keeping our houses in order, then struggle for “quality time” with our children, which means we are giving them some degree of sincere attention, and then rush to our all consuming work. And what is work except “paid attention” where (in many cases) we are being paid to “pay attention” to something that we would not otherwise be the least bit interested in? How many of us would be interested in that latest report, all those grey lines of facts and figures, if we were not paid to give it our attention?

    Then there is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD. Many of our children do not seem to be able or willing to pay attention to what we wish to impart to them in our schools. They can’t sit still for it –they are restless and can’t learn what we want them to. Since we aren’t paying them, they often refuse to “pay attention.” For some, having spent their developmental years watching four to six hours of TV a day, with endlessly flashing three  second images, their attention is fractured, so they cannot attend to the slower moving world around them.  For other children, what we are trying to get them to pay attention to can be  irrelevant to their stage of development, or useless to them in the world they will live in. When this becomes acute, they are labeled disturbed or hyperactive, and we drug them into passive submission, leaving only a portion of their attention in the classroom.

    Yet children are only the “canaries in the coal mine” of our fragmented, hyper-speed, excessively materialistic modern societies, and their suffering warns us of the danger we all are in. The three behaviors of  hyperactive kids-- constant scanning to ensure they won’t miss anything (“distractibility”), their ability to make instant decisions and act upon them, (“impulsivity”), and their love of excitement (“need for high levels of simulation”) could well describe the state of our collective attention today.

     Millions of us suffer to some degree from some form of attention deficit, but it may be the only reasonable response in a society where the world is changing at a dizzying pace, and we are expected to change ourselves to keep up with it. We are bombarded with thousands of messages every day –email, junk mail, TV and radio ads and bulletins, newspapers and magazines -- all screaming for our attention. We have grown so accustomed to this that if the background noise stops, such as being in silence alone, many people become very uncomfortable, and have to turn on the TV or radio. So we have all learned (often unconsciously) to put up screens or filters to protect our attention in a world of sound bites and gripping images that threaten to overwhelm us. We half attend to all this outer noise (just in case there is something important we need to know about), but we don’t really let it into our deeper selves.  

     This habit of half-listening then carries over into everything and everyone we encounter in our daily lives—and we end up only half listening to our spouses, children and friends. No wonder there is so much alienation, violence and divorce in a society where the only place some people find that anyone pays real attention to them is on talk radio. It could just as well be called “listen radio” –as people are desperately searching for someone to listen to them.

    When was the last time you had a conversation where you felt you were truly heard—your deeper self attended to—by the person you were with? Are not your closest friends those who “really listen” and “hear the real you” when you have something important you need to say? One of the qualities that makes the Dalai Lama such a great individual is his capacity to pay full attention, with his entire being, to whomever he is listening to.

    We go about our modern lives with our filters and screens, keeping our shields up against unwanted demands on our attention. But Madison Avenue advertisers mount a full-scale assault on the weakness and fractures in our shields to break through and “connect” with us. These message missiles aim for the weakest points in our screens, our emotional insecurities and vulnerabilities, to convince us that we can overcome our false fears and inadequacies if we just have the newest car, techno-toy or exotic vacation. They work hard to make you forget the basic truth that wherever you go, whatever you buy – it’s still you who is there!

    All this manipulation of our attention leaves us highly pre-occupied by an invading army of images and suggestions, with our subjugated attention deciding how best to negotiate with the invading force. We say, “If I just have enough money for the right house, a new car and stereo, then I can relax and pay attention to all those things I never seem to get to.”

    And when we have given a lifetime of attention to these things, we may realize in our final years, as have so many, that we never gave any attention to what is most important – what is inside ourselves, in their hearts. We may not have any attention left for the small voice within that asks, “Is this really who I want to be? Am I happy with what I attend to each day? Or do I want to pay more attention to my family, my friends, the state of my community and my world? Have I paid attention to what I most value in my heart?”

      We might want to ask, “If I believe in sharing what I have, how much have I actually shared in the past year? If I love my children, how much of my attention have they received? If I love the environment, what have I done to protect and restore it? If I honor creativity, what have I created recently? Have I paid attention to what my inner self, my soul, is telling me about what I need to be attending to? Or have those values and goals withered for lack of attention, like plants unattended for too long?”

     As we begin to become more aware of what we are attending to, we can take charge of what our attention goes out to and how we can control it more fully. We have the power to decide what we give our attention to. As we take back control, we can stop allowing ourselves to be hypnotized by television’s and the media’s ruthless grip on our attention, and remove its talons from our minds. As we do this, we find that we can recapture the fortress of our own awareness, and we then have all the attention we need for what is closest to our hearts.