Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life

by Winifred Gallagher

Choosing the Focused Life

your life—who you are, what you think, feel, and do, what you love—is the sum of what you focus on.

the skillful management of attention is the sine qua non of the good life and the key to improving virtually

every aspect of your experience,

your life has been fashioned from what you’ve paid attention to and what you haven’t.

if you had paid attention to other things, your reality and your life would be very different.

if you could just stay focused on the right things, your life would stop feeling like a reaction to stuff that happens to you and become something that you create: not a series of accidents, but a work of art.

Staying focused on a goal over time might not guarantee you’d achieve it but was a crucial step in that direction.

your life is the creation of what you focus on—and what you don’t. Whenever possible, I looked toward whatever seemed meaningful, productive, or energizing and away from the destructive, or dispiriting.

you cannot always be happy, but you can almost always be focused, which is the next best thing.

William James (1842-1910),

fellow founder of psychology, remains its philosopher king.

“The whole sting and excitement of our voluntary life depends on our sense that in it things are really being decided from one moment to another,

As the expression paying attention suggests, when you focus, you’re spending limited cognitive currency that should be wisely invested, because the stakes are high. At any one moment, your world contains too much information, whether objects, subjects, or both, for your brain to “represent,” or depict clearly for you. Your attentional system selects a certain chunk of what’s there, which gets valuable cerebral real estate and, therefore, the chance to affect your behavior.

By helping you to focus on some things and filter out others, attention distills the universe into your universe.

Along with performing the Apollonian task of organizing your world, attention enables you to have the kind of Dionysian experience beautifully described by the old-fashioned term “rapt”—completely absorbed, engrossed, fascinated, perhaps even “carried away”—that underlies life’s deepest pleasures,

Paying rapt attention,

increases your capacity for concentration, expands your inner boundaries, and lifts your spirits,

it simply makes you feel that life is...

That little piece of reality that you tune in on is literally and figuratively far sketchier and more subjective than you assume.

Because different people focus on different things—even different aspects of the same thing—to say that someone else “lives in a different world” is to speak the plain truth.

The focused life requires not just a robust capacity for paying attention but also the discerning choice of targets that will invite the best possible experience.

we must find something engaging to focus on in order to pass the time—

Deciding what to pay attention to for this hour, day, week, or year, much less a lifetime, is a peculiarly human predicament, and your quality of life largely depends on how you handle it.

We must resist the temptation to drift along, reacting to whatever happens to us next, and deliberately select targets, from activities to relationships, that are worthy of our finite supplies of time and attention.

Other choices

concentrate on your hopes rather than your fears; to attend to the present instead of the past;

the difference between “passing the time” and “time well spent” depends on making smart decisions about what to attend to in matters large and small, then doing so as if your life depended on it. As far as its quality is concerned, it does.

your joie de vivre mostly derives from paying attention to someone or something that interests you.

we don’t appreciate our own ability to use attention to select and create truly satisfying experience.

just as who you are affects how you focus, what you focus on affects who you are.

when you lose focus, your mind tends to fix on what could be wrong with your life instead of what’s right, putting you in a bad frame of mind.

Focusing on upbeat emotions such as hope and kindness literally, not just figuratively, expands your world, just as dwelling on negative feelings shrinks it.

multitasking is a myth.

your life is the sum total of what you focus on

I have a plan for living the rest of my life. I’ll choose my targets with care—

then give them my rapt attention. In short, I’ll live the focused life, because it’s the best kind there is.

your experience, your world, and even your self are the creations of what you focus on.

the targets of your attention are the building blocks of your life.

much of the time it’s potentially under your control.

Bottom-up attention automatically keeps you in touch with what’s going on in the world,

IF BOTTOM-UP ATTENTION asks, “What’s the obvious thing to home in on here?” top-down attention asks, “What do you want to concentrate on?” Because this active, voluntary form of focusing takes effort,

the top-down

deliberate process is the key to designing your daily experience, because it lets you decide what to focus on and what to suppress.

ALL DAY LONG, your reality develops from the shifting targets of your automatic and deliberate attention.

Of course, vision is just one of five sensory systems that collaborate with your attentional networks to construct your physical world.

By turning the volume knob up or down on smell, say, or by switching from the touch to the taste circuit, you can tune in the information you want and tune out competing stimuli.

In short, magic is what happens when you’re paying attention to something else.

As it is in magic, so it is—at least more often than we like to imagine—in life. To condense the vast, encyclopedic world down to a comprehensible pocket edition, your attentional system, like the magician, focuses you on some things at the expense of others.

However, research shows that