The Habit of Attention

I'm back from spending one entire week away from The Ones I Love to explore, with 150 other educators (school and homeschool), the educational philosophy and methodology of Charlotte Mason. It was, for the third year in a row, a highlight of my year!

While there were many things that I learned from being there and many things that were reaffirmed for me, there was one thing that really stood out for me as a weakness in myself: attending - the habit of attention, the discipline of self control.

In North Carolina I witnessed people who were busy with a hundred tasks, all important to the smooth running of the conference, completely stop what they were doing and give full attention to others who approached them with questions, needs, concerns. The individual person was more important to these over-tasked conference planners than any measurable occupations. Time and again, personal deadlines and quantifiable activities took a backseat to people. Those tasks got done, to be sure, but they were done around the needs of the people, rather than the people's needs being worked around the tasks.

I was humbled. I was ashamed.

I thought about The Ones I Love and the way I so often ask them to wait while I do my things, only give half an ear to the stories they want to share, put them off in a dozen different ways.

Here I am, wanting to develop in the little ones the habit of attention, and not only have I not been modelling it, I haven't even noticed that it wasn't there!

I had a long drive home from the conference, which I shared with two special friends, and in that drive I verbalized some things that I hope to be held accountable for.

The first (and maybe the easiest) is this:

I need to curb my time at the computer. It is one of the main distractions I have from The Ones I Love and from spending time with my Lord. I'm going to set a specific time for dealing with emails (and no checking outside of that time, no matter what exciting things I might be waiting for: if someone needs me urgently, they'll phone); I'm going to have a specific time for computer-based scheduling and record-keeping; and I'm going to completely eliminate games on the computer. In fact, just moments ago Dear Man 'hid' the games on my laptop, at my request, and removed all signs of them from the startup menu.

The rest of my reflections will have to wait until another, pre-scheduled computer time! For now, the children are tucked in bed and I have two appointments: one with my Dear Man, the other one with Jesus.