Rapt caught my attention after reading an excerpt in the Utne Reader. The thesis was pretty straightforward – what you focus on determines your experience of life. I was intrigued because I had always struggled with paying quality attention to my children, ostensibly the focus of my work as a stay-at-home mother. I wanted to experience my life with them better, and I wanted something more than a simplistic parenting book that suggested setting aside 20 minutes of play without distraction each day with each child.

Winifred Gallagher covers a lot of ground in the psychological study of attention and focus, from bottom-up attention to your immediate circumstances and needs – the demands of the world to top-down attention that you direct to things that you choose (like your job, family, or hobbies).

Gallagher argues that attention is selective—one can’t focus on everything. Further, emotions guide attention, more often than not to negative places as a measure of self-preservation, and it is up to the individual to guide his attention to more positive emotions that actually expand his ability to focus. Rather than seeking to be happy at all times, Gallagher shows that one must guard what one attends to, with the example that older people are often better able to focus on the simple pleasures of life. She sites research that shows that what one pays attention to shapes her brain and behavior.

One of the more interesting parts of Gallagher’s book dealt with intimate relationships within families. Rapt attention is crucial for these relationships to work, but also important is the ability to see the other person’s world not only from one’s own point of view.

Gallagher advocates identifying those activities to which one can pay rapt attention and reach the state of “flow.” Ideally, if one’s work fell into this category, it would seem not like work at all, but play. Flow is so arresting to the individual that he will continue to challenge himself at the activity to stay in the flow.

The import of attention is also revealed in decision making (we often attend to our memories rather than our experiences) and creativity (great work requires rapt attention). The distractions of modern life – particularly, electronic – and desire to multi-task are shown to impede productivity and real learning in children. Finally, mental and even physical ailments are often grounded in poorly directed attention.

At the end of the book, Gallagher’s sometimes annoying propensity to be politically correct and non-religious gives way to her reverence for particularly Tibetan Buddhism, and the rapt attention to the present that is the end goal of much meditative practice.

Nonetheless, Gallagher’s thoughtful book provides mental fodder for this mother’s desire to focus on the moment with her children, to identify individual motivations that can guide my top-down, chosen attention to that which my remembering (not experiencing) focus has determine to hold the most value in my daily life – my children.