A moment of most intense attention I remember happened while holding my grandson. He was just a few months old and had this fantastic capacity to focus all my attention on him. In a way, it stopped my ability to think to focus on being connected with him. It was what he, in his way, asked for. I didn’t need to do more; it happened in the flow of our connection.

It’s the natural flow of concentration that isn’t disturbed by thought.

Naturally, neither he nor I could sustain it all the time. That’s when we had to reestablish the connection and bring our attention back toward one another.

Concentration is similar but asks us to stay connected with our object of attention ourselves.

Distraction is anything that grabs our attention. It’s a natural and useful reaction that helps the human species survive.

What nature didn’t expect was the multitude of ways humans would use this mechanism. Consider all the available stimulation that serves our modern world, may it be the signals we use to regulate the way we are invited to drive from one place to the other, the sound used to start and end a meditation, alarm clocks, pings or light signals smartphones present us with, etc.

Such signals serve us as much as they distract us. They grab our attention asking us to let go of one point of attention to refocus on another. However, due to the sheer mass, what regularly happens is that the speed at which we would need to let go of focus and refocus to capture all the information is beyond our mental ability. It’s how scrolling becomes an experience of being disconnected and a desire for something to connect with – the better attention grabber that will slow us down.

In principle, dealing with large amounts of available information is something we are equipped for. It’s the very reason humans have such an attention-grabbing mechanism. Our ability to filter the information available to us at every moment requires a mechanism capable of gaining our attention for the new, the unknown, or whatever else may be a danger. It goes in overdrive, confusion, or overwhelm whenever there are more attention grabbers than information we’ve learned to process.

That babies can grab our attention so well most certainly demonstrates how nature helped our species. They need our attention to learn what they need to be attentive for, and nature has equipped us to be sensitive to such needs.

Considering how it works with babies, it doesn’t seem that developing the ability to process more information would help us.

Maybe that’s what makes meditation a useful practice for me. It teaches me to let go of judging automatically whatever thought, emotion, or experience appears to me, thus reducing my own attention grabbers. Stepping into meditation, the context is clear, it is a space I’ve chosen for its security and lack of other distractions.

It’s a bubble. Similar to the one I experienced with my grandson.