Your staunch enemy is inattentiveness.

-the Shinobi Hiden Scroll

The Shinobi Hiden scroll is a 17th century ninja manual passed down and preserved by the legendary family of Hattori Hanzo. In the quote above, its brevity speaks volumes.

Inattentiveness is the enemy. And it’s not just any enemy; it’s a staunch enemy, one that isn’t going anywhere and isn’t backing down.

While people have always struggled with inattentiveness, our current culture breeds inattentiveness. We are rewarded for being inattentive, for clicking on the headline, for switching tabs, for checking in on our social media feeds. My teenager admits that Snapchat makes you feel like you lose something if you break your streak. (What Snapchat doesn’t tell you is that it also breaks your concentration on whatever you were doing before you clicked over. And it will take you fifteen minutes, at least, to get that concentration back.)

Everything in our culture screams, “Look here! Look at me! Over here now!” It can feel impossible to hold your center, or even know where you are. And that lack of centeredness, that fuzziness, is the enemy of everything that leads to your growth. It prevents a stable mind. It blocks your capacity to cultivate wisdom.

The more we click, the less we claim. We can’t own anything, not even our own thoughts, because we are just jumping from one thought to the other, like monkeys in a field of trees. We cannot claim our own lives, because we are repeatedly handing them over to advertisers and articles and posts and open tabs.

Aren’t our lives worth more than that? Don’t they deserve better?

The ninja trained in awareness, first and foremost. They worked on this beautiful balance of being fully relaxed and in the moment, and absolutely dialed into everything going on around them. They treated inattentiveness like an awareness-crippling virus, because they realized it is one. Not paying attention to our lives, to our world, to our people, is such a poison.

And it’s a poison we don’t have to ingest.

Any time we choose, we can open our eyes, be present, and perceive what’s around us. We can show up.

Inattentiveness is a staunch enemy. But attentiveness is a worthy adversary. And hopefully, when we taste attentiveness, we realize it’s worth the effort.