Simone Weil wrote that attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. For a long time I read that as a lovely exaggeration. I think I am only now beginning to understand that she meant it plainly.
We tend to imagine prayer as a kind of speaking, a list of requests, a set of words aimed somewhere upward. And it can be that. But the older I get, the more prayer seems to me to be a matter of attending rather than asking: of becoming, for a few minutes, genuinely present to something other than my own churning. Less talking, more looking. Less performing, more receiving whatever is actually in front of me.
This turns out to be enormously difficult, and not for spiritual reasons but for ordinary ones. My attention is the most contested territory I own. A dozen industries are built specifically to capture and resell it, and they are very good at their work. I sit down to be still and within ninety seconds my mind has filed three errands, rehearsed an argument I am not currently having, and reached for a device I did not consciously decide to pick up. The hardest part of any contemplative practice is not the exotic states it promises. It is staying in the room.
What I find moving about Weil's idea is that it makes attention a moral act and not merely a mental one. To truly attend to another person, to set down my own agenda long enough to actually see them, is one of the most generous things I am capable of, and one of the rarest. Most of the time I am half-listening, composing my reply, waiting for my turn. Real attention is closer to love than I usually admit. It costs something. It requires that I become briefly less central to my own experience.
So I have started to think of the practice the way I imagine a meditator thinks of the breath: not as a state to achieve but as a place to keep returning. The attention wanders, it will always wander, and the practice is simply the return. Notice you have drifted; come back. Notice again; come back again. There is no version where you stop having to return. The returning is the thing itself.
I cannot tell you this has made me holy. It has made me, on my better days, slightly more available, to the person across the table, to the light coming through the window in the late afternoon, to whatever it is I am usually too busy to receive. That seems like enough to keep practicing. Most days it is the only prayer I manage, and I am no longer sure it is a lesser one.