The Quietest Form of Love: Attention
We live in an age that constantly whispers the same message to us: Do more. Become more. Build more. And, to be fair, professional success matters. For many of us, it isn't simply about ambition anymore. It is about security, independence, paying the bills, creating opportunities for our children, or simply being able to live the life we want. So we work. We answer the message during dinner. We take the call on Sunday. We promise ourselves that we'll make more time for our loved ones the next weekend. We'll call our best friend when this project is over. We'll have a proper evening with our partner when things calm down. And sometimes, things do calm down. But then something else begins. Last summer, I listened to a business plan presented by my neighbour's 24-year-old daughter. She was working on an app and could barely stop talking about it. There was something wonderful about watching someone believe so completely in an idea. I could almost see the future she was imagining for herself. I also noticed something else. The project was beginning to consume almost every waking hour she had. And I remember wondering: What happens to the people we love while we are busy building the life we hope to share with them? I didn't have a good answer. Then, a week later, I heard a successful entrepreneur talking about almost exactly the same problem. He had recently exited his company, and the interviewer asked him how he had managed to stay close to his family whilst building his business. His answer surprised me. He hadn't managed it by finding enormous amounts of free time. He had found a way to make small amounts of time carry more meaning. He created something he called a 12-month photo album for his mother. Every month, he chose one photograph of something they had done together. Nothing elaborate. Just one photograph. At the end of twelve months, he put them together into a little slideshow and gave it to her on her birthday. Twelve photographs. Twelve small pieces of a year. But when his mother watched them, she wasn't looking at twelve photographs. She was looking at twelve moments in which her son had thought about her. That distinction matters. Because sometimes the people we love don't need enormous amounts of our time. They need evidence that they still occupy a small, warm corner of our mind. That is something different from time. It is attention. And attention may be one of the quietest forms of love. I liked the idea so much that I started doing my own version with Aliyah. Three months in, I have to admit something: I'm enjoying it. I take one photograph from something we did that month. I am going to share it with her on her birthday. The reason, I believe, why photographs are so powerful. They don't merely preserve what happened. They remind us who we were with when it happened. And maybe that is the little trick for people like us who are trying to build something, achieve something, provide something and still remain close to the people who make all that effort worthwhile. You don't necessarily have to find more time. Maybe, sometimes, you just have to make the little time you already have visible. If you like the idea, who are the people you might want to make the yearbook for? Wishing you a productive week, Bob
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