The single most powerful force in the universe is attention. Only that which is attended to lives. The flower unattended by the sun withers; the whale unattended by the sea washes lifeless to the shore; the baby unattended by its mother will not live to become a child. All of life depends upon the attention given to it by some other part of life. We live in, by, and for communion.  
 
Remarkably, only we humans ever forget that, forget that we personally have a contribution to make to the cycle of attendance by which life keeps itself alive. A monkey will look in a mirror and delight in his reflection, sometimes for hours, but a monkey, even a conceited one, never mistakes the monkey in the mirror for the meaning of the universe, never says about his reflected other half: "Why, you're all the monkey I will ever need." People crave attention, but we alone forget that we, alone, atrophy and die.
 
By attention I do not mean applause, or praise, or public celebration. We like it, of course, when people clap for us, or when they recognize who we are and what we have accomplished in some demonstrably noticeable way. But the attention that changes our life is far less public, and far more meaningful than all that. When another person really attends to us, he is not trying to make us feel better; he is trying, rather, to feel what we feel, so that whatever we are feeling--good, bad, or worse than terrible--he is feeling with us, and thus whatever we were feeling alone we are now feeling together. The attention that connects us to the heart of another person is the kind we truly crave. More than being cared for, in the sense of someone doing something for us, and more than being applauded, we most deeply desire to be connected to others, heart to heart.
 
When we wonder what the future holds for our species, we would be wise to consider the state of our art of attending; for if we lose that art--the art of feeling in our heart how another feels in hers--then we shall surely die. There is no technology, and never will be any technology, that can substitute for our need to give and receive love. We must learn how to listen, and learn how to talk, from a place beyond judgment. We must forget our egos and remember each other. 
 
To whom are you attending? Who is attending to you?