Freedom and Worship:The Currency of Attention and Time

Good Day Steemians!

It's Friday and its been a long and very exhausting week. Its been the kind of week that requires frequent episodes of focused mindfulness and a purposeful centring of myself in the "here and now". I have grown to see the importance of being in a state of wakefulness and being aware of the kinds of things I think about. Granted, being in this heightened state of awareness is easier some days as compared to others and I certainly don't claim to always be successful. Somedays I fail, and if I'm honest, I fail miserably. This work, however, gives rise to what I believe are our most important and powerful forms of currency: time and attention. The fiat currency and cryptocurrency pale in comparison to the revolutionary power of our time and attention.

Time and attention are powerful forms of currency although we may not often think of them in those terms but it is important that we begin to do so. There is power to what we give our time and attention to as these things ultimately grow and start to shape how we see the world. So, I ask what do you allow to consume your time and energy?In a sense, what we allow to consume us is inevitably what we end up worshiping. David Foster Wallace in a brilliant keynote address once said the following words:

"Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race"-the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing."(1)~David Foster Wallace

Worship is not something reserved for church or the seemingly holy and pious. It is something we unconsciously and consciously do everyday. I hope that in today's uncertainty, social and political upheaval we will start to see how valuable our attention and what we choose to pay attention to, is. This choice of where to place our attention is the only sense to which we are radically free. Jean-Paul Sartre once claimed that "Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does." What we choose now will have consequences in the future (not just for ourselves but for humanity as a whole). Choosing is a revolutionary act. Knowing this I ask: How will you worship today for a better tomorrow?

(1)
David Foster Wallace: This is Water