attention – Allan Johnson, PhD

I left a tarot workshop yesterday with an insight that was startlingly clear: I spend a great deal of time living in the future. Card after card suggested anticipation, projection, preparation, movement toward what comes next.

The irony was not lost on me. Present-moment awareness — mindfulness, contemplative attention, the cultivation of presence — sits at the centre of my teaching and much of my writing. I talk frequently about inhabiting experience rather than managing it, about learning to notice rather than constantly optimise. And yet, as anyone who works in this space knows, the practical reality of such work involves a surprising amount of future-thinking: planning programmes, designing workshops, mapping trajectories, building structures that do not yet exist.

At the moment my notebooks are full of precisely this energy: outlines for new offerings, teaching plans, lists of ideas, and preparations for the opening this Spring of my new online community space, Innerworks (more on this very soon). All meaningful, all exciting — and all subtly orienting attention toward what is not yet here.

The cards were not criticising ambition or creativity. They were pointing to something more delicate: the ease with which we begin to live ahead of ourselves.

Psychologists sometimes describe this as time orientation — the habitual direction in which our attention leans. In The Time Paradox, Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd argue that individuals tend toward past-, present-, or future-oriented modes of living, each with advantages and distortions. Future orientation, often celebrated in productivity culture, enables planning, discipline, and achievement. But pushed too far, it produces a life experienced primarily as preparation.

Philosophers have long recognised this tendency. Martin Heidegger described modern existence as characterised by projection — the self constantly thrown forward into possibilities. Henri Bergson distinguished between measurable clock time and lived duration, reminding us that real experience unfolds qualitatively, not as a sequence of tasks awaiting completion.

There is a peculiar paradox when presence becomes one’s professional field. Teaching mindfulness, creativity, or contemplative practice requires organisation. Workshops must be scheduled. Communities must be built. Emails must be sent. Ideas must become structures.

The work of helping others arrive in the present inevitably involves calendars. Over the past months, as I’ve been developing new programmes and thinking carefully about how to support creative and reflective communities more deeply, I’ve noticed how easily meaningful planning slides into subtle deferral. The mind begins narrating life as a sequence of upcoming thresholds:

Once this launches.
Once this settles.
Once this next phase begins.

The tarot workshop simply named what I already half knew: I had begun relating to the present primarily as a staging area. And the strange thing is that the more meaningful the work becomes, the easier this trap is to fall into. Purpose intensifies projection.

This weekend my partner and I visited the Orchid Festival at Kew Gardens — its 30th anniversary this year, and something that has become part of our late-winter rhythm. It is, objectively speaking, an exercise in logistical patience. Timed tickets, queues, dense crowds moving slowly through glasshouses thick with humidity and colour.

And yet something happens once you are inside. Orchids have an almost unreasonable beauty. Shapes that seem designed rather than grown. Colours that look improbable even while directly in front of you. People shuffle forward, phones lifted, conversations softening. Despite the press of bodies, time loosens.

Standing there — surrounded by impossible blooms and sharing the experience with someone I love — I noticed a rare stillness. Nothing needed to happen next. The present moment was sufficient.

The trap of living elsewhere is subtle because it disguises itself as responsibility. We believe we are being diligent, visionary, prepared. And often we are. The future matters. Planning matters. But presence is not opposed to planning; it is what prevents planning from becoming exile. The challenge, then, is not abandoning future-thinking but returning, repeatedly, to lived immediacy.

This insight has shaped how I’m approaching my upcoming workshops. Increasingly, I see creativity itself as a form of time practice — a way of restoring balance between imagination and presence.

Creative work asks us to plan and to surrender, to envision and to attend. Writing, especially, teaches patience with unfolding. You cannot inhabit a sentence that you are already trying to finish.

That’s partly why I’m so excited about the programmes beginning this March. They are designed not simply as skill-building spaces but as environments where people can rediscover a different relationship to time that supports both aspiration and groundedness.

If this reflection resonates, you might consider joining:

5 Days of Creative Abundance
9–13 March | 7.30–8.00 PM GMT | £29
A short, gentle immersion designed to reset creative momentum and reconnect with possibility through small daily practices.
Register here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/313206797/

The Writer’s Flow Circle: A 12-Week Group Coaching Circle
Beginning Monday 23 March | 7.30–9.00 PM UK time | £180
A sustained space for writers seeking structure, accountability, and deeper alignment with their creative rhythms.
Register here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/313207235/

Both, in different ways, are invitations to stop postponing creative life until conditions feel perfect.

The lesson from yesterday’s tarot spread was not that I should stop imagining the future. It was simply a reminder to visit the present more often — to stop treating it as a corridor leading elsewhere. Presence is not a permanent achievement. It is a practice of return. And perhaps that is why moments like the Orchid Festival linger: they reveal that life is not waiting for us at the end of our plans. It appears briefly, vividly, whenever attention and experience coincide.

The future will arrive soon enough. In the meantime, there is always this moment.

As I prepare for some very exciting spring workshops and begin working with a new cohort of 1–1 clients, I find myself returning again and again to the question: what kind of attention are we cultivating? And to what ends?

At the same time, I am collaborating with colleagues at the University of Surrey on a research study exploring the relationship between mindfulness and originality. I have designed an 8-week Mindfulness for Originality programme that we are currently trialing, and we will be studying its outcomes over the coming months. The premise is simple but, I think, quietly radical: that sustained, non-reactive attention is not the enemy of creativity but its precondition.

This runs counter to a certain romantic myth of originality as frenzy. But when we examine the intellectual lives of figures like Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, or Virginia Woolf, what we find is not scattered brilliance but disciplined depth. Woolf’s diaries are full of labour—patient, iterative, attentive labour. Originality emerges not from distraction but from fidelity.

The philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that we have moved from a disciplinary society to an achievement society, in which the violence is internalised. We exhaust ourselves trying to be endlessly responsive. The result is not freedom but fragmentation. In Stolen Focus, Johann Hari traces how economic and technological systems have steadily eroded our capacity for sustained attention, not as an accident but as a business model.

The ethics of attention, then, must reckon with power.

Who profits when we are distracted? Who benefits when we can’t read a long book, hold a complex argument, or sit with a difficult feeling?

Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows made this argument over a decade ago, but the evidence has only intensified. We are training our brains toward interruption. And yet, paradoxically, we long for immersion.

I see this longing in my coaching practice. People do not come to me because they lack ideas. They come because they cannot hold their ideas long enough to deepen them. They skim their own lives.

Reading, in this context, becomes a form of resistance.

To read a demanding text—say, a passage from To the Lighthouse or a dense philosophical argument—is to enact a countercultural choice. It says: I will not be hurried. I will not reduce this to a headline. I will allow complexity to exceed me.

But attention is not only about texts. It is about how we inhabit our own projects.

In the 8-week programme we are trialling at Surrey, one of the early exercises invites participants to notice the precise moment at which they reach for distraction during creative work. Not to judge it. Not to suppress it. Simply to witness it. The findings, even anecdotally, are striking. Original insights tend to arise not in the first burst of enthusiasm but in the stretch just beyond discomfort—when one stays.

There is an ethics here, too. To stay with one’s work is to honour it. To stay with another person is to dignify them. To stay with oneself—especially in the face of uncertainty—is to cultivate integrity.

This is why I am so passionate about the upcoming 5 Days of Creative Abundance workshop (9–13 March, 7.30–8.00 PM GMT, £29).

Yes, it is a practical, energising, five-day immersion into creative flow. Yes, it will give you tools, structure, and momentum. But underneath that, it is an experiment in attention.

For five evenings, we gather. We turn toward what matters. We practise not skimming our own creative impulse.

Abundance, as I understand it, is not accumulation. It is depth. It is the experience of discovering that when you attend properly to one idea, it unfolds. When you give something your full presence, it yields more than you expected.

There is a quiet confidence that arises from this. Not the performative confidence of broadcasting productivity, but the grounded confidence of knowing you can enter and remain in meaningful work.

If you have been feeling scattered, thinly stretched across platforms and obligations, this workshop is designed for you. If you sense that there is more in you—but you can’t quite access it amid the noise—this is for you.

I am intentionally keeping the price accessible (£29) because I want the barrier to entry to be low. But do not mistake accessibility for superficiality. The container will be strong. The invitation will be serious.

You can register here:
https://www.meetup.com/the-art-of-creative-practice/events/313206797/

And if you are ready for more sustained support, my 1–1 coaching work continues alongside these group offerings. In those spaces, we go deeper. We examine not only habits of attention but the attachment patterns and identity narratives that sustain them. We design structures that protect what is most alive in you. It is precise, relational, and tailored.

Attention, I am increasingly convinced, is a form of stewardship.

In an earlier book project, I explored the ethics of mediation in mail-order occultism—how printed texts promised transformation across distance. I am struck now by how similar the stakes feel. Every medium shapes consciousness. The question is whether we use the medium deliberately or allow it to use us.

Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum that “the medium is the message” was not a celebration; it was a warning. If our dominant medium fragments attention, then our inner lives will fragment accordingly—unless we intervene.

This intervention need not be dramatic. It begins with small, repeatable acts. Reading ten pages with full presence. Writing one paragraph without checking a phone. Listening to a friend without composing a response.

It also requires community.

One of the reasons I continue to run workshops—even as I refine my focus and prepare for new directions—is that collective attention is amplifying. When we gather around a shared intention, distraction loses some of its grip.

There is something profoundly moving about watching a group of people choose depth together.

In my own life, this season feels like a threshold. New 1–1 clients. Spring workshops taking shape. Research that, I hope, will contribute something meaningful to the conversation about mindfulness and creativity. It is not frenetic expansion. It is intentional cultivation.

And so I return to the ethical question.

What deserves your attention?

Not what clamours for it. Not what monetises it. What deserves it?

Your most original ideas do not shout. They wait. They require a certain stillness before they reveal themselves.

If you would like to practise that stillness—and discover what abundance might mean in your creative life—I would love for you to join me for the 5 Days of Creative Abundance.

Attention is not merely a mental resource. It is the substance of a life.

And how we give it—what we allow it to shape—may be one of the most consequential ethical decisions we make.

Tag: attention

Time Orientation and the Trap of Living Elsewhere

The Ethics of Attention: Reading, Writing, and Living in a Distracted Age