How far would we make it through today without relationships, without others helping us to find what we need or to do what we must do?

Or put it another way: how many relationships will we invest in today?

We know relationships are important – the bus driver who’ll help me get to work today, the co-worker who’ll work on the project.

To build relationships we need to pay attention, but attention needs some help:

‘To be its best, Attention, from inside itself it seems, summons Ease.  Ease emerges and dips and saunters, draping itself around Attention’s focus, allowing it dimensions greater than focus alone can produce.

[…]

We bought into an equation […].  Rushed = Important.  Tense = Focused.  Tight = Professional.  Pressured = Alive.  They are all the same thing.  And not one is true.’*

It’s counter intuitive but we are rediscovering that the more time we invest in relationships the more we produce:

‘Walking, I realised long ago in another desert, is how the body measures itself against the earth.’**

(*From Nancy Kline’s More Time to Think.)
(**From Rebecca Solnit’s Wanderlust.)