A quiet moment before the scroll
On noticing what enters our days before we do
This morning, before I was fully awake, I reached for my phone.
Not out of urgency. Not because something needed tending. It was simply the reflex — the familiar move many of us make before we’ve even decided what kind of day we want to have.
Within seconds, my attention was already elsewhere. Not on anything I’d chosen, exactly. Just… elsewhere.
What stayed with me wasn’t the content itself, but the speed. How quickly a morning becomes populated with other people’s thoughts, bodies, jokes, opinions, and ambitions before we’ve had a chance to arrive in ourselves.
Later, I noticed a stack of notifications waiting from LinkedIn. I’ve been mostly absent from the platform for weeks, so I was curious what I’d “missed.” It turned out to be a parade of reactions to other people’s activity including updates that didn’t help me think more clearly or orient my day.
Except one.
A friend had quoted something I’d said to him in passing, and shared how it had lingered with him. That kind of attention makes sense to me. It has weight. It travels differently.
The rest felt like motion without direction.
I’ve been thinking a lot about that distinction lately, what actually deserves entry into our days, and what simply arrives because the system is very good at sending things our way.
Attention has become porous. Not dramatically — quietly. It leaks out through small, ordinary moments that don’t register as losses until they begin to add up.
I wrote more about this after noticing how little of what greets us first thing in the morning is designed to help us decide, reflect, or create. The full essay lives on my site, where I’m trying to gather these observations more intentionally.
If you’d like to read it, you can find it here:
[The Notification That Didn’t Deserve Me →]
No urgency. No promise of solutions. Just a shared noticing.
Thanks for being here,
MaryLou