Any act of attention is an act of love

What is attention? Attention is love. Any act of attention is an act of love. If you choose to pay attention, you are discovering that it is work. And you’d have to choose to do the work; no one else can do it for you. If you choose to do that work, you are in effect, in a sense, giving yourself to the person or the thing that you are paying attention to. We talk about giving attention don’t we? It’s like giving oneself. And if we don’t receive attention we feel neglected, we feel badly treated, or we feel hurt, damaged in some way by that.

Grace at Work by Laurence Freeman OSB