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Your time and attention are your most precious possessions. Use your time well! Without time you can do nothing, and without your attention everything is meaningless. Occasionally one hears people claim they don’t have enough time to do what they need to do, and yet the average American supposedly spends six hours a day watching TV. TV can be wonderful, and very enlightening too, but it can also be a bottomless pit of bad advice and bad habit formation.

Not so often do we hear people complain of not having enough attention, and I’m not just sure if there is any good terminology for describing that mental state. The word “bored” comes to mind, but implies one has plenty of attention available, but is somehow trapped in some situation that doesn’t permit doing something that is more engaging of the attention. Or perhaps one has something to attend to that is important and has the time to engage fully in the activity, but there are distractions which can not be ignored, like someone blasting a TV in your periphery.

Your paying attention to something is your mind telling your brain that the something is important to you, to your core self, and it primes all of your brain to make the necessary adjustments to make the things that are related to that attention to be brought to the fore for that module of your brain. Almost all of these things will be invisible to the conscious mind, but because they are attending to the particular things the relevant mental actions will be prepared to come to the conscious attention when  necessary, even before they are necessary. Without your attention everything is meaningless, everything is just random happenings waiting for some directing force to make a composite mental construct to be worked with; the mind is designed to make sense of things, and when there is nothing to make sense of it sends out the unpleasant sensation of boredom. The directing force is what is usually thought of as the conscious mind, but what is that but the thing that happens to challenge the current situation seeking a pattern of sense, and that can be as little as making sense of an unexpected noisy bang that demands attention. That is the consciousness for a moment, but it is the directed consciousness, some problem being solved, that is generally thought of as consciousness. But is that any more than the bang? Isn’t it just what the directive energy of the moment is concentrating the consciousness on, because something more demanding isn’t apparent at the moment? To think about complex things requires that the rest of one’s environment be relatively safe, but then there needs to be a problem that one is willing to focus one’s attention upon.

So to return the core idea:

Without time you can do nothing, and without your attention everything is meaningless.