It happened because I wasn’t paying attention. Or rather, I was paying attention to too many things, which is the equivalent of heeding nothing at all: the baby on the counter; my seven-year-old “washing” dirty dishes at the kitchen sink; the oven, which was slow to heat; the narrowing after-dinner homework window for my fifth grader’s history project; the Slack notification that flashed above the recipe I was reading on my phone; and which institution was NPR reporting that Trump had just dismantled? Shouldn’t I drop everything and tune into that ? These were, ostensibly, my nonworking hours, but I was white-knuckling through them: Those collard greens that had been languishing in the fridge, they were going to get chopped and cooked tonight. Or maybe not, because a moment later, I
How We All Lost Our Focus—And How to Get It Back

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