Paying attention is an essential 21st Century life skill. At a time when multi-tasking is widespread and even celebrated, it has never been more important to emphasize the importance of cultivating our moment-to-moment awareness.

Strong relationships require paying close attention to those around us. Meaningful, deep learning requires attending to and developing our thoughts in increasingly more complex and nuanced ways. A fully-experienced life requires that we turn off the auto-pilot that typically guides us so that we can pay close attention to our senses—the layered sounds that surround us, images of the natural and constructed worlds, the feel of the sun on our face and our feet on the ground.

The choice to pay attention is available to us at every moment throughout the day, a series of choices that offer unending opportunities for new beginnings.

Dennis Sparks’ “Things Observed” essays and photos encourage readers to see familiar things in new ways. He also writes a blog on school leadership and can be contacted at dennis.sparks@comcast.net.