Keep your wits about you… or what it takes to become a human being instead of a monkey with a big brain

One of the amazing things I learned from The Jungle Book is that humans are really just monkeys, if we look at their behavior. Lots of chatter, no aim, short attention span, have no ability or even need to think independently…

Very interesting findings. Once you put your attention on a behavior, capacity, characteristic, you start to see what it does for you… or conversely, what the lack of it does for you.

The capacity I am now observing is attention. 1

One thinks that it is obvious to people what is attention, but it isn’t… In fact I remember when and where I first learned about attention: not the word, that I learned early on, but the phenomenon… It was in a novel about Israel, and how a perimeter guard’s lack of ability to hold his attention got all his kibbutz killed.

It’s become a recurring nightmare for me, and a practice.

I used the practice in two ways: increase the number of minutes that I can keep…