Attention

Bob Fisk
Jun 8
5 min read

Updated: Jul 6

On the act of directing your awareness, and what it is not.

You are standing at the kitchen counter waiting for the kettle to boil. Your eyes dash around. They are on the kettle, the dishes in the sink, yesterday's mail on the counter. Your hand is resting on the counter. The kettle has yet to whistle. In this moment, where is your attention?

For many of us it is somewhere else entirely. It is on what happened earlier. It is on what is coming next. It is on the conversation you wish had gone differently last week. The kettle is in front of you. Your hand is on the counter. But your attention is being firmly held by the Mind and the constant re-running internal narratives it generates.

This is the first fundamental distinction we need to make. The physical sensations that are present in the body, where your eyes are aimed, these are not the same thing as where your attention is. Attention has its own point of focus. It moves independently of where you happen to be standing or what is going on around you.

Attention is the act of directing your awareness. It is the verb, the action, not the thing (noun). You can have your eyes on something and your attention on something else. You can have your body in one room and your attention in another. You can have your hands occupied with a task and your attention occupied with something twenty years old. The fact that this is possible, that attention can decouple from sensory experience, is one of the most important features of being a human.

Consider a familiar experience. You drive home along a route you have driven a thousand times. Your hands operate the wheel. Your foot manages the pedals. You stop at the red lights. You turn at the correct turns. The car arrives at your driveway and you cannot recall a single moment of the journey. Your senses were active the entire way. Your body was fully engaged. The car operated appropriately. But your attention was somewhere else for the whole drive, and so, in a real sense, the drive itself did not register. Your body made the journey. Your attention was elsewhere. The two were not coordinated.

Last month we wrote about training attention, how to bring it back when it wanders, why the skill is in developing attentional sovereignty, and what changes when you do this regularly. This piece is the more basic question underneath: what is attention in the first place? You can train something only after you have a clear understanding of what it is…and what it is not.

The reason this matters is that attention often gets confused with other inner phenomena. People say "I am aware of my anxiety" when what they mean is that their attention is on their anxiety. The two are not the same. Awareness is the broader fact of being conscious. It operates whether you notice it or not. Attention is a smaller, more specific thing: it is the direction within awareness. It is where awareness is pointed at any given moment.

A useful image for this, sometimes used in contemplative writing, is the distinction between the stage and the spotlight. Awareness is the stage. It is the open space in which everything happens. The actors, and the content, are always on it. Attention is the spotlight, the directed beam that picks out one part of the stage at a time, leaving the rest in softer light (or darkness completely). The stage does not move. The spotlight does. And we tend to mistake the content of the spotlight's illumination for our entire experience. The rest of the stage is there the whole time. We have simply not directed the spotlight at it.

You can see this difference right now. You are aware of many things in this moment. The temperature of the room. The position of your body. The light reaching your eyes. The presence of these words. You did not generate that awareness; it was already there. You can shift your attention to any one of those things, say, the soles of your feet, and what was already inside your awareness becomes the thing your attention is on. The awareness did not change. The direction of attention did. Next week we will look at this distinction more carefully. For now, it is enough to notice that attention and awareness are not two words for the same thing.

People also confuse attention with thought. We say "I cannot stop thinking about it" when what is actually happening is that our attention keeps returning to the thought. The thinking is the content. The attention is the act of focusing on the thought. The thought itself is not the problem. The repeated returning of attention to the thought is what makes the thought feel inescapable. This is part of why a practice that develops the capacity to redirect attention can change someone's experience of a difficult thought without changing the thought itself.

What attention is not, in summary: it is not awareness, it is not thought, it is not feeling, it is not sensation. It is the act of directing your awareness toward one of those things. It is the choosing, or more often, the defaulting, of where your awareness lands.

This is part of why attention requires your sovereignty. No one else can place your attention for you. Other people can offer their attention. The world can supply candidates for your attention. A loud noise. A flashing screen. An interesting thought. A familiar worry. The world is very good at providing reasons for your attention to land somewhere specific, and increasingly, much of the world is designed to capture and hold it. But the intentional act of placing your attention on something is, fundamentally, yours alone. It is one of the few things in adult life that is genuinely yours to direct. Most of us do not direct it. Most of us let it default to wherever the mind, or the loudest stimulus, sends it. But the capacity to choose is always there.

A small practice for this week. Several times a day, in ordinary moments, ask yourself: *where is my attention right now?* Not as a test. Just as a check-in. Standing in line. Brushing your teeth. Walking from one room to another. Notice that your attention is somewhere. Notice that, almost certainly, it is somewhere other than where your body is. Bring it, gently, to the room you are actually in. The cool tile under your feet. The hum of the refrigerator. The fact that you are here. That is the act of attention being directed. The fact that you had to redirect it does not mean you were doing it wrong. It is what attention does. The skill is in the noticing.

Next week we will look at the awareness that contains all of this, the broader space in which attention does its directing.