The Quiet Theft of Attention

Every morning
I arrive on time
to a room already humming,
screens awake before the sun,
notifications clearing their throats
like impatient clerks.

Work waits for me
in neat rows of urgency.
Tasks stacked like bricks,
emails like sparrows
pecking at the glass of my mind.

No one asks me
to look deeply.
Only to respond quickly.

I move my hands all day.
I move data,
numbers,
documents that resemble meaning
the way shadows resemble bodies.

At dusk
my muscles ache,
my calendar looks heroic,
yet something essential
has not been used.

Not tired —
unspent.

The tragedy is not the weight of work.
It is its thinness.
Its refusal to ask me
to be fully here.

We have mastered motion
without direction.
Velocity without gravity.
Days rush past like rivers
no one drinks from.

I think of forests
where nothing is hurried
yet everything is precise.

The leaf does not multitask.
The root does not skim.
The river does not check
how fast it should flow.

Attention there
is total or nothing.

A hawk does not half-watch the field.
It does not glance
while thinking of another sky.
It gives itself
to the moment of descent.

And because of that
it eats.

At my desk,
I skim my own life.
I scroll past my hours
as if they were advertisements
for something more important
coming later.

We keep people busy
so they do not notice
how little they are asked
to care.

Engagement has been replaced
by compliance.
Focus by availability.
Presence by performance.

I am measured
by output,
never by absorption.

No one asks
whether I disappeared into the work,
lost track of time,
forgot myself
because something meaningful
held me.

Instead, I am praised
for responsiveness.
For being reachable.
For never going offline
inside my own skull.

The mind,
once a deep lake,
is now a shallow feed.

Ideas skim the surface
and leave no ripples.
Thoughts do not root;
they pass through
like weather
we are too busy to feel.

At night,
I look at the stars
only long enough
to name them.
Never long enough
to be undone by them.

Even wonder
has become a checkbox.

The cosmos
does not operate this way.

Stars burn
by giving themselves entirely
to one impossible task:
holding light against collapse.

Galaxies turn
for billions of years
without interruption,
without alerts,
without asking
if the effort is visible.

Nothing meaningful in the universe
is done halfway.

Black holes do not fragment their attention.
They bend everything toward them.
Total focus warps reality.

I wonder
what would happen
if our work demanded that kind of gravity.

If instead of asking,
“Are you busy?”
we asked,
“Are you absorbed?”

If meetings were replaced
with silence long enough
for thinking to arrive.

If work asked us
not just for hours,
but for care.

Attention is not a resource.
It is a form of devotion.

Where we place it
is where we place
our lives.

But modern work fears devotion.
It prefers efficiency.
It prefers surfaces
that can be monitored.

Absorption is dangerous.
It cannot be tracked.
It resists interruption.
It makes people whole
in ways that systems cannot own.

So we fragment the day
into slices too small
for meaning to inhabit.

We keep minds jumping
so they never sink.

A seed
cannot grow
in constantly disturbed soil.

Neither can a person.

Somewhere inside me
is the memory of being lost
in a task —
writing, building,
thinking so deeply
that the boundary between self and work
dissolved.

Time softened.
The world quieted.
I was not productive —
I was alive.

That state is now rare,
treated like an indulgence,
something to be done
after real work is finished.

But it is the real work.

Civilizations did not rise
from busyness.
They rose
from sustained attention —
from people willing
to sit with complexity
long enough
for insight to emerge.

Cathedrals,
mathematics,
music that still vibrates centuries later —
none of it was multitasked.

Creation requires
a long gaze.

Even healing does.

A wound does not close
while being constantly reopened
by distraction.

Neither does a mind.

When I imagine
a different future of work,
it is quieter.

Not empty —
attentive.

People gathered
not around urgency
but around questions worth staying with.

Workdays shaped like deep breaths
instead of sprints.

Metrics that measure meaning,
not motion.

Organizations brave enough
to trust that if you give attention room,
value will follow.

The universe is expanding,
yes —
but it is also coherent.
Forces hold.
Patterns repeat.
Attention exists
even at cosmic scale.

What we are losing
is not time.
We are losing the ability
to enter time.

To inhabit a moment
fully enough
that it changes us.

The tragedy of modern work
is not exhaustion.
It is shallowness.

Not overload,
but under-asking.

We ask people
to produce without immersion,
to contribute without care,
to spend their days
without giving them something
worthy of their full presence.

A star would refuse such work.

So would a river.
So would a tree.

Perhaps we should listen
to the older intelligence of the world —
the one that knows
that attention
is how meaning moves
from the universe
into human hands.

Until then,
we will keep mistaking motion
for progress,
busyness for worth,
and wonder
for something we no longer have time for.

And the cosmos will keep turning,
patient,
focused,
waiting for us
to remember
how to look back.