We Can Be All There…

One of the most gracious and considerate men of our acquaintance, and one of the busiest also, puts at ease those who come to call by giving them his complete attention. Many people seem preoccupied when others are talking to them, and the split attention is obvious. It is difficult to talk to people who are thinking two ways at once. This tendency has many manifestations. There are those, for example, who only give half attention in their offices, who only give half attention in an interview, those who only give half attention when receiving instructions, those who try to read or study while looking at or listening to entertainment. This two-way attention is hardly effective for either purpose. Perhaps all of us have sat in church or in a classroom and received credit for being present when the thinking part of us really wasn’t there. There is much of merely getting by, much of skimming the surface, and too little of the earnest, concentrated doing of things in depth. “Concentration,” said Emerson, “is the secret of strength in politics, in war, in trade, in short, in all management of human affairs.”¹ “If I have made any improvement in the sciences,” said Sir Isaac Newton, “it is owing more to patient attention than to anything beside.”² “The power of applying attention, steady and undissipated, to a single object,” said Lord Chesterfield, “is the sure mark of a superior genius.”³ Competition is so intense, life so complex, that we should learn to concentrate on learning, to concentrate on reading, to concentrate on doing, and not live in a half awareness, trying to hear two things or see two things or do two things at the same time. We are all responsible for what we do with the gift of life that God has given, and if we splinter and dissipate it in too many different directions, we achieve little or less than we otherwise would. To succeed we must have direction and concentration. The thinking part of us must be present. Said one eminent observer: :There is one thing we can do, and the happiest people are those who do it . . . We can be completely present. We can be all there.”⁴