Nones like Catherine, or Atheists who insisted that their service to people in need constituted a form of "prayer," often seemed to have a much greater attentiveness to the sensibility I saw (or imagined?) in Maya.
Volitional attentiveness is much trickier to study than is a simple response to a stimulus, yet scientists have made progress through improved brain-scanning technology and the ability to measure the firing patterns of specific neurons or the synchronized firing of clusters of brain cells.
As much as excellence is valued in this program, attentiveness and enthusiasm are valued even more.
How we, as voters, have reacted to the Vietnam records or non-records of men as various as Al Gore, Dan Quayle, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Bill Clinton has said as much about the condition of our own moral attentiveness as about theirs.
So much of the political campaign is conducted without attentiveness to any moral coherence, even though there is a great deal of cheap religious talk.
In conversation with Ms. Lindy, whose school was one of 153 that received A's on the city's much-disputed progress reports this year, Ms. Black smiled with convincing attentiveness through the kinds of rambling digressions that chief executives rarely are expected to sit through; she perked up when she heard something she thought she could use.
But they may also very well be judging you by the instantly created standards of Sept. 11, by your attentiveness to the world around you, by how much of a better place you actually make it.
Also, they sound much more modern if you call them "micropowers", suggesting specialism or attentiveness, like "microscope".
You need a great deal of time and attentiveness for his art because there is always so much to read, from the throngs of coded symbols – asterisks, circumflexes, cedillas – up the fishing lines, down the ladders and across the grids, staves, stripes and scaffolds that become the underlying grammar to his lexicon of forms.
And I rarely know the nature of the metaphor when I begin to write, but there is an attentiveness that a writer develops, a sudden alertness that is much like the feel of a fish brushing against a hook.
