A thesaurus will tell you that the opposite of attention is inattention—that is, the failure to pay attention.  But that’s a little misleading.  Unless we’re asleep or unconscious, we’re never really inattentive.  We’re just distracted.  In other words, you cannot pay attention to nothing; you can only pay attention to the right or wrong thing in the moment.

Of course, we’re all prone to distraction in some measure.  And anything, from an alert on our phone to an ambulance siren can pull our mind’s focus from a worthy object to a less worthy one. The question is, can we avoid distraction?  And if so, how?

Simone Weil observes:

“Every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit.”

In other words, our capacity for sustained, undistracted attention is the result of effort—you have to practice it; and it must be directed at a worthy object—your habits of attention won’t improve if you practice focusing on unworthy things.

Think about it: Nobody ever says that a phone user was distracted by their driving, or that a daydreamer was distracted by his teacher’s lecture.  It always runs the other direction…because the distraction, by definition, points us away from where we should be focused, away from what is true and good and beautiful.

The good news is, that’s why you’re here.  An education is, in many respects, helping you to pay attention to what is most worthy.  As Plato said more than 2,000 years ago:

“[Education] isn’t the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately.”

We’re here to show you what is worthy of your attention.  The only question for you is, will you make the effort?

Have a wonderful day.