WHAT IF YOUR ATTENTION IS MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU THINK?

What you give your attention to, you get more of.

A few months ago, my boyfriend and I went for a walk along a beautiful path beneath a canopy of trees. It was a hot day, but under the trees it was cooler. There was a breeze, birds singing, beautiful scenery, and a wooden boardwalk winding through it all.

I was taking it in and enjoying everything around me.

My boyfriend was trying to zoom through the path, and I kept pulling him back.

“Hello? We're going for a lovely stroll.”

He looked at me and asked, “What's a stroll?”

“A very slow walk where you actually exist in the moment.”

So I started pointing things out to him. The birds. The breeze. The trees. All of these beautiful little things that were making the walk so enjoyable to me.

And then he said, “Yeah, well, they had to ruin it by putting that ugly fence over there.”

I looked over.

There was, in fact, an ugly fence.

And I had never seen it.

I don't mean that I had noticed the fence and chosen to focus on something prettier. I literally had not perceived it. Until he pointed it out, that fence had not entered my experience at all.

One of my teachers once told me:

In that moment, I understood what he meant in a way I hadn't before.

We were walking the same path at the same time, but we were paying attention to completely different things. I was in a state of gratitude and wonder, noticing everything that felt beautiful. And somehow, in that moment, I didn't even have room in my awareness for the ugly fence.

That experience stayed with me because it showed me just how powerful our attention can be.

What you consistently pay attention to becomes more of what you experience.

If your attention is constantly searching for what's wrong, you will find more things that are wrong. But when you make a point of noticing what is good—what brings you joy, what you're grateful for, what makes you smile—you begin to experience more of that, too.

This isn't about pretending difficult things don't exist.

It's about remembering that where you place your attention matters.

You might be surprised by how much you haven't been seeing.