The most valuable asset you have is not your time or your money, but rather, your attention. It is so precious, in fact, trillions of dollars are spent worldwide to capture it. Add in the fact that we are living in a soup of distraction that includes being bombarded with more information than the human brain can handle, and you have a recipe for mental chaos.
But there is a solution, and it is very simple: take back your attention from things you didn’t choose to focus on and place it where you do.
I learned about the power of attention by climbing ice. The first time I ever scaled a frozen waterfall was the first time I felt what it was like to be fully present. My thinking mind ceased to exist, and I was left with a deeper part of my consciousness coming to the fore. This part of me was beyond my normal sense of identity, beyond the history that I carried around with me, and beyond the emotions that accompanied my personal story. In that stillness, I felt a sense of peace and joy I had never experienced in my twenty-eight years of life. I was a drug addict at the time, and I knew I had discovered something so powerful it would transform my life.
I have come to call what I had stumbled upon “mountain bathing,” after the now-popular forest equivalent. For me, it is the deepest form of meditation to be so fully absorbed in the present moment nothing outside of it exists. Isn’t this what we are all seeking, that feeling of being radically alive? It answers the question of why someone would purposely put themselves into difficult situations, even at the risk of their lives. And it is the opposite of the comfort bubble we are currently encouraged to live in.
We don’t all need to become ice climbers, but we can all practice ways to invite presence into our lives and harness our most valuable, and endangered, asset: focused attention.
