A reflection on what we give ourselves to.
Where has my attention been going lately?
Sometimes, I don’t even know.
It is strange how easy it is to lose a day without ever choosing where it went.
I find myself sitting in a work chair on a slow day, wanting to be productive. Or at least wanting to feel like I am. I dislike the feeling of going to work and having nothing to do. Those hours are meant to be used. They are meant to become something. After all, isn’t that why we go to work?
But on slow days, when no customers are walking in, time starts to feel strange. Empty. Almost wasted.
And quickly, guilt appears.
I start feeling like I should be doing something important. If the day is slow, then at least I should take advantage of that empty time before it flies away.
So I begin searching through my thoughts.
Should I write my next article for the Journal?
Should I work on something for my tattoo website?
Should I start a design project?
Should I read?
Should I brainstorm ideas?
That last one can be dangerous.
Sometimes brainstorming feels productive, but it can also become a hallway with too many doors. I spend the whole day walking through possibilities without entering any of them. Maybe for some people that’s easy. For me, not always.
So I reach for my phone.
At first, it is with good intention. I want to find an article to read. Or images for design inspiration. Or go through my article topics and see if something resonates.
Then somehow, through mysterious ways, I end up opening social media.
Not even with full attention.
Just scrolling.
Half there.
Half gone.
Twenty minutes later, I return to myself not exactly sure where I went.
Sometimes, a day disappears without being fully entered.
Some things don’t steal from us loudly. They take a little at a time.
And maybe that matters more than we admit.
Attention is not just a mental process. It is a kind of direction. It points us toward certain feelings, habits, desires, fears, and versions of ourselves.
It is how the mind spends life.
What we give attention to, we keep close.
So the question becomes simple, but uncomfortable:
What am I deciding to hold?
What do I keep giving attention to that gives nothing back?
And what am I slowly becoming because of what I keep looking at?
Give your attention to something long enough and it starts to change you. Old books, wise people, and life itself have been trying to tell us that forever. We begin to notice it more. We begin to understand it. We begin to care.
So why do I keep giving attention to things that don’t shape me in a good way?
It is not hard to see why we get pulled.
Everything is built to invite another second.
Another scroll.
Another opinion.
Another notification.
Another piece of noise dressed like something important.
And of course, this doesn’t mean we don’t deserve distraction. I don’t think we need to abandon technology, delete everything, and go live full monk mode in a cave somewhere. I like the internet. I use it. I find ideas there, images, references, books, articles, inspiration.
The problem is not always the tool.
Sometimes the problem is that we stop choosing.
We give our attention away before we realize we had given anything at all.
One of the costs I didn’t see at first was how fragmented my thoughts became. Less depth. Less stillness. Less presence. Days started to blur together. Then those days became weeks. Then months. And when you add them up, you realize how much life can be spent half-present, distracted by things that never truly gave anything back.
I really dislike feeling busy but not present.
That feeling is strange.
You can do many things in a day and still feel like you never fully arrived inside it.
I work in busy environments. There is noise around me all the time. Some days I am up since early morning and don’t fully rest until midnight. Long days. Loud days. Productive days.
My attention is focused on the task in front of me because it has to be. Tattooing demands it. A line only needs a small moment of carelessness to lose its direction.
But then, in the free moments, I often try to escape.
I entertain my mind.
I scroll.
I check.
I distract myself from the tiredness.
And by the end of the day, even if I worked hard and did what I needed to do, there are times when I feel like I wasn’t fully present for any of it.
Like the day passed through me, but I didn’t fully pass through the day.
That is a different kind of loss.
Not dramatic.
Not obvious.
But real.
Because those distracted moments become distracted days. And those days, when gathered together, become pieces of life that were lived but not fully seen.
This is why attention matters.
Not because we need to be serious all the time.
Not because every second must be optimized.
That would be another kind of prison.
Attention matters because life is happening where attention is placed.
If I am always somewhere else, then where am I really living?
Lately, in the middle of noisy days, I have found a quiet kind of comfort in training myself to come back.
Not perfectly.
Not always.
But more often than before.
Sometimes it begins with stillness. Not dramatic silence. Not escaping the world. Just a small pause before reacting. Before scrolling. Before giving myself away again.
A breath.
A moment.
A return.
There is something powerful about realizing you have drifted and bringing yourself back. It feels like waking up inside your own life again. Like finding the path after wandering too far into the trees.
The present moment is simple, but it is not always easy to stay with.
That is where life is actually happening.
Everything outside of it can become noise if we live there too long. Memories, worries, imagined futures, endless possibilities, old conversations, digital feeds, things that already happened, things that may never happen.
The mind can build entire worlds and lose itself inside them.
But the body is always here.
The breath is here.
The room is here.
The work is here.
The person in front of you is here.
Maybe protecting attention begins there.
Not with a perfect system.
Not with deleting everything.
But with asking, quietly:
What deserves my looking?
What deserves my mind?
What deserves this piece of my life?
Maybe the question is not only what we pay attention to.
Maybe the deeper question is what our attention is quietly making of us.
Because in the end, where attention goes, life follows.