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.