In the silence just before a concert begins, listeners witness a moment of total focus onstage. A single note sounds. Performers repeat it, tune to it. It’s a window into hours of concentrated effort leading up to the main event.
Intent single-mindedness seems to be key to success, small and great. Think of a little child learning to walk. Or American baseball Hall-of-Famer Eddie Mathews taking 50 to 100 extra grounders a day to improve his fielding. Or poet Maya Angelou concentrating on regaining her ability to speak when she was a young girl. Instances of purposeful persistence like these can be truly inspiring. Yet the real essence of attention is spiritual.
The Discoverer of Christian Science captured this fact: “The rays of infinite Truth, when gathered into the focus of ideas, bring light instantaneously, whereas a thousand years of human doctrines, hypotheses, and vague conjectures emit no such effulgence” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 504).
