What Seeds Are You Watering?
I am finding more and more peace and calm from my mindfulness practice. Recently, I was listening to The Art of Mindful Living by Thich Nhat Hanh, and I was struck by a question he posed: What seeds are you watering? He explained that we all have seeds of unhappiness, fear, anger, joy, and wellbeing within us. Even mindfulness itself is a seed. The seeds we give our attention to are the ones that will grow.
The Power of Awareness
Our mindful accountability programs are effective because they increase awareness. It is so easy to start your year, quarter, or even your day with the best intentions. You know what you want to accomplish, but distractions take over. Your energy gets diffused, and before you realize it, you have shifted from intentional to reactive. Your mind becomes consumed with thoughts that are watering the wrong seeds—fear, sadness, anxiety, or stress—without you even noticing.
Mindfulness as a Practice
Coming back again and again to water the seeds of your goals is a mindfulness practice. Staying aware, aligned, and in action is a challenge—especially in today’s attention economy.
The current profit models are to monetize your attention. The last thing you are encouraged to be is mindful of your time and energy. The more you lose yourself in scrolling, in putting things in your cart, in letting the next episode run, the more profit is being driven. But what does that do for you? Does that create more of what you want? Probably not. Instead it is creating more of what you don’t want.
I think Brandon Stanton, founder of Humans of New York, said it very well when he wrote in a post at the beginning of 2024:
Our world is hard-wired to give us more of what we pay attention to. In the last few years this trend has rapidly accelerated. Every time we look at a screen, even if we are just mindlessly scrolling—artificial intelligence is watching what we pay attention to. More than watching, it is studying. More than studying it is obsessively measuring, training itself, getting better—at giving us more. More of what we pay attention to. It doesn’t care about our weaknesses, our insecurities, our blindspots, our biases, our addictions. It doesn’t want us to be better people in 2024 than in 2023. Admittedly, it doesn’t want us to be worse either. It only wants one thing: our attention.
Our attention, where we concentrate our awareness, is essential to creating anything meaningful. It is the water we put on the seeds of what we want to grow.
This is your friendly reminder to treat it like the precious resource that it is.
