My Cute Little Attention Hogs

They cannot stand absence, even when it is only in your mind that you have absented yourself. Just as you are immersing yourself in doing whatever removes your attention from them, they will stir, struggle, cry out, disruptively remind you of their presence, remind you to be present. Your becoming inane with boredom is OK with them. They might even let you attend to something that only lightly engages you. But they will by no means stand for your becoming absorbed. They must, always, have at least a part of your attention. Food you need only given them every three hours or so, but attention you have to supply constantly. It seems to be, in fact, what they mainly feed on. Not affection, mind you, but attention – that which addresses not the heart but the ego. At this stage, affectionate talk, kisses, caresses they find at best amusing, more often merely tolerable, and sometimes bothersome enough to make them kick out at you. This leaves me in little doubt that the organ growing most rapidly in their little beings, and therefore in need of the most sustenance, is the ego. But I suppose it only makes sense that the ego should get priority in human being’s development. Although much-maligned, supposedly the nemesis of the heart and that from which, later in life, true wisdom is supposed to distance us, the ego is, after all, essential to one’s sense of holding together as a unit with a place in the worl – a place from which to put yourself in relation to the rest and begin to develop understanding, intelligence. Without the ego in place, the self does not hold as as a center and all in life remains apart, unintelligible.

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