Meta-awareness ?. In a nutshell !!

Have you ever thought, how your mind perceives time when you are thinking ?. Exactly, at that time, you would have missed the essence of its feel and if you don't feel the connection, then you are essentially missing the highest form of love, that you can give to the person/thing at that moment of time [1]. Guess what binds all of these together, its Attention. Attention is a really really powerful ability and with which you can proclaim wonders and sometimes, the wonders are existent just around you. But, what makes you so sad and feeling deprived in your life (always wanting more ?). You might have heard of this very famous fact:

"The average human has an attention span of just 8.25 seconds according to recent studies – 4.25 seconds less than in 2000." and 

"Average Goldfish's Attention Span is around 9 seconds"        

The feeling of stress, threat and anxiety are the major contributors and influences to grabbing your attention and mending it in different ways. Guess who thrives from utilizing this very weakness from us ?. Every single company who uses something called 'attention economy', to feed of your brain's natural chemical reactions and manifest it into a 'forged amalgamation', which will hook you onto the various manifestations (social media, adverts, hardware, notioned evangelists) that they had setup, forcing you to become 'text-necks'.

Further [1], explains what the underlying phenomenon is, it is something called "mental time-travel". Where you never live in the present moment, it is this conceived and planted notions, that shift your attention fueled by the influences (mentioned above) to the past or future, hence resulting in an incessant stasis.

Well the future need not be this grim, all it takes is just a few minutes per day to concentrate on things that you really want to pay attention to. You can trace them by paying attention to your attentions (Meta-attention), or at least the inducer to the attentions. Its like basically analyzing your processes, contents, impulses that your brain drives your focus towards. By doing so, you can basically give/stop attention at your own will and have more governance towards it. By being so, you can have complete control of yourself and not let anyone make you take a decision that you didn't want to. Most of the time you are already living the life you are wishing for and you would have the things that you yearned for few years ago. It is not a sign of falling back, in fact its your growth but is it a worthy compromise to the attention you didnt give to the things in the present at that instant of time, is a question answerable only by YOU.

Wandering of our brain is actually good and what it wanders to is the key. The key to yourself is your mind. Training your mind to consciously wander will help retrieve your attention in a more channelized way, that's where innovation strives. Be mindful of the emptiness that your mind may behold !!!!!!!

Reference:

[1] Dr. Amishi Jha is a professor of psychology at the University of Miami.