"Attention is the beginning of devotion — and without devotion there is nothing. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report."
Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. Attention is the beginning of devotion — and without devotion there is nothing. Attention without feeling, I began to learn, is only a report. An openness — an empathy — was necessary if the attention was to matter.
"Attention without feeling is only a report." The line I want above the desk. Newport's deep work is the same gesture without the warmth — Oliver gives it back.
Re-reading at night. Tonight it lands differently — the line is about my mother, not about reading.
This is the same gesture you marked fourteen months ago in Deep Work — "the ability to focus, without distraction, on a cognitively demanding task" — though Newport frames attention as a skill to be trained and Oliver frames it as a tenderness the world is owed.
"The ability to focus, without distraction, on a cognitively demanding task — this is the superpower of the 21st century."
"To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work."
"A pattern language is not a recipe. It is a way of paying attention, written down, so that other people can pay attention with it."
"Lost things continue to be ours only if we cease to grieve for them; otherwise they take everything else with them."
"How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives."
"Show, don't tell. Then show again. Then say it once, slowly."