· reading · attention
A quieter kind of attention
How slow reading changed my working day.
Sometimes the thing you’re trying to see only appears when you stop looking for it. That’s the paradox of attention — the more deliberately you try to catch a thought, the less likely it is to come.
For the last six months I’ve been keeping a pencil and a small notebook by my desk. Not for to-dos, not for journalling, not really for anything. Just for when a sentence shows up.
What I found
It turns out I had a lot more thoughts than I realized. They were just getting lost in the stream of little tasks.