The Risk of Attention

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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For the raindrop, joy is entering the river. – The Sufi Prophet Ghalib

We live in a state of bracketed experience.

We are both in experiences and of experiences. Being in and of experiences can be hard to understand. The raindrop is both in and of the river. We are in and of baseball when we are in the experience of baseball. A lion is both in and of the jungle when she is in the experience of the jungle.

In and Of – Inside and Outside

Being both in and of considers consciousness and attention. That is where it gets tricky. There is risk involved. Marke Nepo writes about a joining of all-of-what-we-keep-inside and everything-outside-us. Risk is allowing what we-keep-inside to be seen and judged. Risk is letting everything-outside-us steamroll our gut, our intuition, our knowing. Risk is being truly known. Without risk isolation beats rejection, sadness beats ridicule, and fear beats failure. When we risk connection, joy, and hope win. That is the delicate dance of in and of – the joining of the inside and the outside. Attention and consciousness enter in at the point of choice. What we pay attention and what we are conscious of matters. We choose who and what to let in. We choose who and what to keep out.

Moments of Great Wholeness

The entire point of making the in and of, inside and outside, distinction is to create more wholeness in our lives. For example, when we are in a deep conversation with a loved one, that is a time when our in and inside meet our of and our outside. When we are cooking a meal, playing a game of chess, listening to music, dancing, spending time near the ocean – whatever we chose to do that puts us in the flow – those are times when our in and inside meet our of and our outside. We can choose to pay more attention. We can choose to be more whole. The reward of paying attention far outweighs the risk.

https://kitt.global/may-28-the-risk-of-attention-mark-nepo-the-book-of-awakening/