Attention or attending,
which came first?
Is this a chicken-egg conundrum?
Is it that you had to have attention
to see if you were actually attending?
Or, is it that you had to attend
to attention to make sure it was so?
So, without really asking
which is sort of like a self-dare,
how do you come upon this
without really calling
either one of them out?
Where would you go in your person
to secretly sneak back and observe
without either one of them noticing.
Go ahead and try it!
(So if I am attending to my attention,
my attention is on attending.
And if my attention is on attending,
then it takes my attending
to realize the benefits
of attention at work.
But if I don’t have attention
on attending
then the rigor of attending
does not work.)
No matter what, either one
or both, are somehow
standing behind me
real quiet like, trying to help,
not knowing what
slippery slope I am up to
but still handing me bits and pieces
without the slightest
self-conscious clue!
They are like Siamese twins,
conjoined at the mind
and I have no linear clue
as how to
surgically alter their situation.
No matter how small
of an increment of one
I can make clear to myself,
somehow, there is a smaller element
at work in there of the other.
Attention and attending,
they’re quite separate and unique,
but damn if I know
which comes first!
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