May I Have Your Attention?

Most of my days don’t feel dangerous. They feel urgent.

Without intention, I take actions like they’re the same experience. They aren’t. Despite knowing this for most of my life, I forget it constantly. This has proven to be a second-to-second diagnosis for me.

It wasn’t always like that. For the first part of my life, I wasn’t sure I would survive the actions of other people. Later, there were periods when I wasn’t sure I would survive my own. Those experiences are part of my story, but they are not the point of it. I don’t romanticize them, and I don’t wish them on anyone. I cannot share how I see the world without acknowledging the reverence they left me with for the extraordinary system we call survival.

Whatever else is true about me, I am here because it worked.

My instincts moved before my thoughts ever had the opportunity to organize themselves. My body recognized dangers my conscious mind could not yet describe. Generations of people before me solved enough survival problems that I inherited a nervous system capable of participating in moments I never could have reasoned my way through.

We cannot overstate the benefits of survival.

What is interesting to me is not what happens during those moments. Survival is remarkably good at what it does. I have nothing to offer but thanks. When the danger is genuine, time disappears. There is no opportunity to optimize, rehearse, explain, or wonder what someone else might think. Reality acts before I have time, and my participation is entrusted to my biology.

That is what survival evolved to accomplish.

I think the better question begins the moment time returns.

If I have time to think, I have entered a different condition. I may or may not recognize it. I may still feel overwhelmed, frightened, angry, embarrassed, hopeful, confused, or convinced that everything depends
upon the next decision. The emotions can be every bit as intense as they were during a survival moment. Relationships may end. Businesses may fail. Dreams may dissolve. None of those things determine the kind of moment I am in.

Time does.

If I have time to think, I am no longer in a survival moment. I am in a living moment.

I can tell when I misdiagnose the moment because my answer is more. More money. More certainty. More knowledge. More opportunity. More success. More influence. My actions support the idea that scarcity is the problem and abundance is waiting on the other side as the solution.

I know this is a misdiagnosis because abundance isn’t the solution. Abundance is the problem.

That does not mean medicine, education, clean water, electricity, safety, or opportunity are mistakes. I owe my life to generations of people who solved survival problems well enough that I inherited something they often never had.

Time.

Their work created the conditions that allow me to spend large portions of my life doing something other than focusing on not dying.

My gratitude for that runs deeper than I know how to express.

The problem is not abundance itself. The problem is what abundance reveals.

Reality is always larger than me, regardless of what type of moment I am in. There are always more relationships than I can understand, more consequences than I can predict, more possibilities than I can pursue, more suffering than I can relieve, more beauty than I can appreciate, and more truth than I can hold at one time.

Survival moments perform an extraordinary act of compression. They reduce reality to something small enough that I can participate in it. The next action becomes visible because everything else disappears behind it.

When time returns, my compression begins to relax and my perception expands.
Possibilities multiply. Relationships become more intricate. Information arrives faster than wisdom. Consequences become more difficult to anticipate. Nothing fundamental has changed except my awareness of how much I cannot possibly carry.

When I experience that condition in a form I don’t enjoy, I call it complexity. When I experience that condition in a form I do enjoy, I call it abundance.

Reality is indifferent to my preferences. It has the same amount of it regardless of my level of perception of it.

Complexity is abundance in a form I don’t like. Abundance is complexity in a form I do like.
That distinction has shaped my thinking for decades because it continually reminds me that changing my preference does not change the condition. Reality is unknowably incomplete. It always was and will be.

That realization changed another word for me: enough.

When I misdiagnose a moment, I treat ‘enough’ as though it were a destination. I imagine it as a financial number, a business achievement, a degree of security, or perhaps one more acquisition that would settle whatever continued asking for more.

My experience has refused to cooperate with the idea of more.

When I was young, my imagination extended far beyond my resources. Imagination became one of my greatest survival tools. It allowed me to leave a present I could not escape by visiting a future I hoped one day to experience.
I survived. Then the relationship reversed.

I exhausted the idea of more and found myself with more resources than imagination. I did not possess extraordinary wealth, but I had exhausted my imagination of things I believed might complete me.

I survived. Again.

The imbalance had inverted, but the relationship had not. Scarcity and abundance appeared to be different conditions, yet they kept returning me to the same problem.

That was when I began to understand that scarcity and abundance were never opposites. They were two experiences of the same relationship between imagination and resources.

When imagination exceeds resources, I experience scarcity. When resources exceed imagination, I experience abundance.

Neither condition tells me what life is for, and neither answers the question that time places before me. My experience has shown me that it is more effective to think of ‘enough’ as a relationship.
It is the relationship in which imagination and resources become available to one another rather than asking one another to provide rescue. Imagination gives resources direction. Resources give imagination form. Neither races so far ahead that the other becomes an accusation.

I have found that something remarkable becomes possible in that space.

Attention.

Attention becomes available because I am no longer spending my imagination escaping the present or my resources trying to purchase a different future. I can participate in the one that is here.

I found it helpful to use language to frame the kinds of questions that become visible when time returns. I call them classy problems. They exist inside living moments.

Classy problems are not a matter of choice; they are a matter of awareness. The instant time returns, with or without my attention, so do they.

What deserves my attention? What is mine to contribute? What is enough? What is indicated?

Those questions have no interest in certainty. They ask something much more demanding.

They ask for participation.

I have spent the better part of my adult life discovering that participation is not optional. Alignment is.

That realization continues to humble me because awareness has never behaved the way I hoped it would. I experience something true, and then I forget. Reality waits with extraordinary patience. Eventually, if I am willing, I notice again. I loosen my grip on certainty enough to recognize the kind of moment I am experiencing.

I have yet to find a way to graduate from that loop. It appears to be a vital part of my survival system, and as such, I have only become more grateful for it.

I have found that gratitude is best expressed as a verb. These essays are my demonstration. They are attempts to notice more honestly, participate more intentionally, and contribute my part to something that was already underway long before I arrived and will continue long after I leave.

If they accomplish anything, I hope they create enough space for a different kind of question to emerge.

May I have your attention?