The Power of Time and Attention
A Stoic Perspective
“The present time is extremely short, so much so that some people are unaware of it. For it is always on the move, flowing on in a rush; it ceases before it has come, and does not suffer delay any more than the firmament or the stars, whose unceasing movement never pauses in the same place. And so the preoccupied are concerned only with the present, and it is so short that it cannot be grasped, and even this is stolen from them while they are involved in their many distractions.”
-Seneca
Marcus Aurelius once referenced time as an ever flowing river and Seneca captures that sentiment in his short moral essay, On the Shortness of Life. Seneca writes to remind that even back over 2,000 years ago, people were focused on so many things, that the present moment quickly escaped them.
Life pulls in a thousand directions and never stops. Without the ability to control our attention, we are never able to hold onto the present moment. We’re either reflecting on the past or being whisked away in thoughts of the future--but within the present is where all the “actuals” live, this is where life actually is because the past is gone and the future completely unwritten.
Marcus, writing to himself in the Meditations, also reflected on this sentiment and reminded himself:
“None of us have much time. And yet you act as if things were eternal... Before long, darkness. And whoever buries you mourned in their turn.”
If we do not learn to focus our attention, the present moment will never be ours to take.
As the psychologist Daniel Goleman once wrote:
“The power to disengage our attention from one thing and move it to another is essential for well-being.”
Attention and time go hand-in-hand. Our time is limited and where we choose to focus that time is necessary to living in the present moment. If we’re constantly reflecting on the past, we’re missing out on the present, on the task at hand, and never end up truly experiencing it.
“The chronic cognitive overload that typifies life for so many of us,” Goleman wrote, “seems to lower our threshold for self-control. The greater the demands on our attention, it seems, the poorer we get at resisting temptations.”
To combat this, we must turn the focus on ourselves and become aware of what we are doing. Self-awareness is key to bringing control of our mind back to the present and properly directing our attention. It is through deep practice and attention within the present that we are really able to experience what is before us and be present.
Marcus reminded himself of this need to stay present in one’s thought so that their actions could properly follow. He wrote to himself and reminded:
“Focus on what is said when you speak and on what results from each action. Know what the one aims at, and what the other means.”
It is only when we bring our attention back to the present moment, to track what our thoughts and actions are, that we can truly grab the present moment and get the most out of it. The present moment is where everything occurs and without properly directing our mind to it, we can never maximize the power of the moment.
Thank you again for reading and I hope you found this useful. Please feel free to heart, comment, or ask questions about this post. Suggestions are always appreciated and considered.
Until next week,
D.A. DiGerolamo