To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. —Mary Oliver

During the past year, I’ve read many articles lamenting the “attention deficit” prevalent among children and adults alike. A February 6, 2026 NPR headline summarizes much of what I’ve been reading and hearing: “Researchers say when it comes to our attention spans, we are at war.” In this article, NPR host Scott Simon interviewed writer Matt Klein about this war. Klein, founder of Zine, a cultural intelligence, sensemaking think tank, reported that a study of attention span started with asking 150 cultural researchers to identify the “defining word of our time”:

And overwhelmingly, the No. 1 word was overwhelmed. And I think at the crux of this dilemma is attention because if we cannot control attention, we cannot control anything else. Attention is upstream of reality. And I think today we’re in this environment where every piece of media, online expression, institutional message, advertisement and piece of entertainment is fighting for our attention. Without diligence, we experience some pretty real psychic damage. I mean, it’s not just the podcast and everyone’s Substack newsletter that they and their mother have, but it’s a text message. It’s what’s on news. It is everything.

When everything seems important, when each piece of information, entertainment, and notification demand attention, overwhelmed may be the best word we have to describe our current situation, but it hardly seems adequate. We’re swimming upstream against the many words and images threatening to drown us. And unlike hearty salmon who defy odds and gravity, we’re mere minnows who can only throw ourselves against the prevailing current’s force.

I recall my father once chuckling at a colleague’s remark that his students might reluctantly (and briefly) pay attention if “Christ tap-danced on a dime.” He made this comment in the 70s. If he were alive today, he’d undoubtedly lament that even this wouldn’t gain most students’ attention. Just yesterday, I read an article in which a returning teacher confessed that she’d shown a 6-minute video trailer of the movie based on the novel they would read, and most students couldn’t pay attention for even 3 minutes. Even a few action-packed minutes of a feature film didn’t win their attention. What chance does any teacher—a mere mortal armed with a whiteboard and a few textbooks—really have in the war for their attention?

I’ve read articles in which teachers confess that many of their students haven’t read an entire book. Some blame curricular trends that focus heavily on the close reading of text excerpts. Others blame cell phones and easy access to social media. Still others blame family and cultural factors. But all of these teachers report their students aren’t in shape to read books They just don’t have the “grit” to complete entire literary works. In one article, a teacher shared his dismay when students balked at reading a 4-page article, complaining that it was much “too long”. He knew if he assigned the article as homework, his students would just use AI to summarize it.

This war for attention feels much like a David-and-Goliath battle. Against the giants of social media, 24/7 entertainment, and news, parents and teachers bring their humble best with slingshots and stones. The battle seems heavily one-sided, indeed. After a particularly rough day of teaching, I remember feeling the futility of my situation. No matter how well I prepared and delivered any lesson, I just couldn’t compete with my students’ cell phones. That was the sad truth of the matter, a truth that had begun to suck the life from me and, I suspect, from most of my colleagues.

And yet, there are those who have—and who continue to—fight the good fight in the war for attention. Perhaps poets have always led this fight. Mary Oliver is one of these warriors. In Upstream: Selected Essays, she writes:

Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones – rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

I recently watched “Saved by the Beauty of the World,” a PBS documentary on Mary Oliver. I was taken with her ritual of walking the same path each day, so she might see and experience what she may have previously missed. Her attention to things—the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers—testifies to her devotion to the natural world. And to her love of the local. As we become overwhelmed by information and entertainment overload, Ms. Oliver reminds us to think smaller, to narrow our vision, to look closely at the “sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.” She realizes that teaching the children requires us to “head them upstream,” for the battle for their attention is an upstream battle. It always has been, to some degree. Now, however, the stream is a raging river against which children are too often powerless. Unless we help them. Unless we retrain them.

And the teaching and retraining start with us. Pastor and writer Timothy Keller wrote, “Whatever captures our attention eventually shapes our hearts.” What captures our attention today? TikTok video trends like the Cereal Challenge, during which someone lies down with their mouth open as someone else pours cereal and milk into it, and then eats directly from their mouth? Or the Fox Eyebrow Challenge, which involves shaving off half of your eyebrows and then using makeup to draw them back on, giving your brows a “foxy effect?” Or updates on Jimothy, the Seattle raccoon with short spine syndrome, whose video sightings have made him an international celebrity?

In the battle for attention, what will shape our hearts—and souls? French philosopher, writer, and social activist Simone Weil understood the high stakes in this battle, claiming that “[a]ttention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” Do we give our phones the “highest degree” of attention as we scroll intently, transfixed by the barrage of words and images? Is this attention tantamount to prayer? This is something to seriously consider.

And what does our attention, or lack of attention, say about what and whom we value? Weil also contended that attention was “the rarest and purest form of generosity.” I remember speaking to a group of educators at a training session years ago and feeling the undivided attention of a gentleman in the second row. He locked eyes with me and urgently took notes after I’d finished making a point. I remember feeling so grateful, so remarkably seen and heard. When I relayed this feeling to another presenter and asked who this man was, she revealed he was a newly hired principal at the local high school. To which I said, “I want to work for him.” And I did, for six of the best educational years of my life. His attention to all—staff and students alike—was “the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

In closing, I’ll leave you with these words from Albert Einstein: “Anyone who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves.” I think it’s safe to say that most of us who claim we can multitask as we process information and enjoy entertainment while attending to other matters at hand are simply not giving these things the attention they deserve. In the attention battle, I’ll take Mary Oliver, Simone Weil, and Albert Einstein as my mentors any day.

How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard. –A. A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

This is my granddaughter, Gracyn, on her first day of school. I’ll always remember this shy smile, the sunny yellow belt of her first-day dress, and the sweet vulnerability that made me want to snatch her away for a day of playing dollhouse, cookie-baking, and walking hand-in-hand down the lane. Today, as she begins her senior year, she faces many “lasts” as she prepares to leave the school and classmates she’s known for many years. Through all the leaving and letting go, my wish for her is this: to know how lucky she is to “have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

I’ve come to believe there’s an art to leaving, that there are those who, through grace and courage, simply do it better than others. I’m not one of these. When it comes to the art of leaving–pardon my French–I suck. In fact, I suck big-time. I began to realize this when I was eight or nine years old. A woman from my mother’s faculty wives’ group (I don’t think I ever knew her name) was moving away, her husband having taken a teaching position at another college. I didn’t really know this woman, nor do I think she was a particularly close friend of my mother’s. But I do remember that she left us an ironing board–an odd but memorable parting gift–and that I was inexplicably sad at her leaving. Decades later, I’ve struggled to explain the magnitude of such a loss. If there were a leaving report card, I’m quite confident mine would read, “needs improvement.”

And I shudder to think of my parting ritual each time I pulled away from my family home in Kearney to return to my Wisconsin or Iowa home. In West with the Night, her memoir recounting her years in Kenya in the early 1900s, Beryl Markham writes:

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.

If Beryl Markham had watched me leave my Kearney home, she might’ve counseled an intervention. Leave in any way except a slow way? Nope. Leave in the fastest way you can and never turn back? No again. Each time I left, I circled the block, hoping to see my parents on the terrace still, hoping to see them wave once more, hoping that I might delay my inevitable departure. I’d like to say that I outgrew this ritual, but that would be a lie. If anything, I made more trips around the block as I aged, for the sharp teeth of mortality held me firmly in its jaws. How many more times would I see them standing on the curb, waiting until I turned the corner, and they could see me no more? I was keenly aware that any time might be the last time, that, in the immortal words of Shakespeare’s Juliet, “Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say ‘Good night” till it be morrow.”

As one who struggles to leave and to be left, I might find solace in the words of English novelist George Eliot, who wrote that “Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.” True enough. Yet, too often, because the agony cuts so deeply, we’re left busily staunching our wounds when we might begin to “look into the depths of love.” But we do look—in time and with the benefit of perspective. And when we do, the riches of this love wash over us in waves that return again and again. The only word that begins to do justice to such a feeling is bittersweet. Our partings are refined through this exquisite marriage of pain and pleasure.

Each day, as Facebook memories pop up, I discover that many are posts about Gracyn. Unbidden, tears spring to my eyes as I read them. In one post, I recalled an afternoon when my daughter and son-in-law stopped by after grocery shopping. Immediately, Gracyn asked if she could stay by herself for a while. When I said yes, she grabbed a random book off my shelf, stood in front of us, and, directing her words to her parents, pronounced, “The Big Book of Leaving says that you must leave. Now. The Big Book of Leaving says so, so get going.” Oh, The Big Book of Leaving! What immortal wisdom might such a volume impart? What stories might we find in its chapters? If there were such a book, I believe its stories and wisdom would be universal: the shared pain and pleasure of those who’ve left and been left by ones they love.

In Letters to My Daughters, professor and author Judith Minty, writes: “I give you this to take with you: Nothing remains as it was. If you know this, you can begin again, with pure joy in the uprooting.” Age affords us this perspective: that everything changes, that there can be joy in leaving one thing and beginning another. When I find myself yearning for the past, wishing for a “do-over,” an hour with Curious George Flies a Kite or the Dora the Explorer dollhouse, I imagine Gracyn graduating this spring and moving on to new adventures, beginning again “with pure joy in the uprooting.” I may not excel in the art of leaving and being left, but I can imagine this. And as I do, I give thanks for my beautiful granddaughter who will make saying goodbye so hard.

Why I Am Without Words

 –for Gracyn

Rooted to the kitchen floor, I stand before you

as sobs crash against your tight-lipped resolve,

your tongue useless to stay the flow

of something dark and cold that rises within

and threatens to undo you.

I’m leaving for three weeks,

and you’ve just helped me load my suitcases for the trip. 

We can’t bear to look at each other,

and shoulder to shoulder as we close the car door,

we quake, our fragile souls quiver.

It’s not for long, I say, just a couple weeks.

But the March wind seizes my words 

and whips them away like chaff.

Today, you’ve sent me a photo of the hyacinth

blooming in my garden.

Because I know you were waiting for them to bloom, you say,

because they might die before you get back.

Miles away, you think of how I’ve waited for these first blossoms

and how I might be missing you as much as you miss me.

Best friends do such things.

For eleven years, you’ve been my granddaughter,

but now—

Now, I’m without words.

I have no language to speak this mercurial joy that washes over me

each time I think of you thinking of me.

What can I say but that the blossoms here are lovely enough;

that time crawls on as it must;

and that even if all the hyacinths wither and die,

my best friend is watching the road

waiting for me to come home.