Your Focus is a Magic Watering Can
4 Alchemical Effects of Attention
I want you to imagine your attention as a watering can filled with enchanted liquid. Each morning, it refills completely, and whatever you pour it on throughout your day transforms in ways that might surprise you.
I know how this sounds—like something whispered by a crystal-clutching wellness guru between sips of kombucha. But stick with me. This is actually quite practical.
The Four Magical Powers of Your Attention
Your attention—your magic water—has four distinct effects, each capable of reshaping the world around you in real, tangible ways:
1. Turning Chaos into Order
Humans have an uncanny knack for bending chaos to their will. We carve out pockets of order in an otherwise unruly universe, stacking bricks, sorting spreadsheets, and herding socks into drawers like cosmic engineers in denial about entropy.
Unlike other creatures, we don’t just react to our environment—we sculpt it. And if we have the power to impose order on chaos, we may as well wield it to make our lives a little easier.
Examples:
You dedicate an hour weekly to organizing one corner of your home. Within months, the disorder in your living space dissolves. The scattered becomes structured.
You spend fifteen minutes daily writing down your thoughts. After a year, the swirling vortex of your mental life reveals its patterns. The overwhelming becomes manageable.
You commit thirty minutes each weekend to maintaining your finances. By next tax season, the feral beast of your economic life is domesticated. The feared becomes conquered.
2. Infusing Energy into Creation
There’s something alchemical about the way sustained attention transforms the mundane into the meaningful. Because creation isn’t just about making things—it’s about transferring a piece of your consciousness into matter.
Unless you count anomalies—like elephants who can paint—we’re the only creatures that can deliberately imbue objects with significance that outlasts us.
Examples:
You invest three years writing a novel. When finished, readers feel transported by your story. Your imagination becomes a shared experience.
You spend six months renovating a dilapidated garden. By summer, strangers slow their walks past your house. Your private vision becomes a public gift.
You dedicate two years to mastering a musical instrument. What began as torturous noise becomes something that brings listeners to tears. Your persistence becomes resonance.
3. Healing What’s Broken
Attention is a spotlight, and what you shine it on tends to mend itself. It’s how we patch up our psyches, stitch together frayed relationships, and—if motivational speakers are to be believed—occasionally rise from wheelchairs at stadium events.
Speaking of which, healing others isn’t about performing miracles or having all the answers—it’s about presence. The way you show up and the steadiness of your attention offers the practical and energetic conditions for others to find their own way forward.
Examples:
You spend twenty minutes each night stretching an injured muscle. Weeks pass, and your body recovers faster than medical predictions.
You dedicate a conversation each week to mediating a conflicted relationship. Months later, festering resentment has morphed into shared laughter.
You offer reiki to a client each month, focusing your attention on their healing. Over time, you notice their energy shift and their tension ease.
4. Nurturing Growth in Others
The most profound magic of attention might be its capacity to call forth potential in living things. Plants lean toward light, children develop around the scaffolding of parental focus, and even adults unfurl new dimensions when bathed in genuine curiosity.
We reflect back the attention we receive—like social tuning forks, resonating with the presence directed at us. That’s why showing up for the people you care about isn’t just nice; it actively shapes who they become.
Examples:
You dedicate eighteen years to raising your child with presence and love. When they leave home, they move through life with resilience and self-worth. Your focus transforms into another’s capacity for joy.
You spend four years mentoring a struggling employee. Years later, they send you an email from their new executive position. Your belief becomes another’s future reality.
You spend a decade as an AA sponsor, guiding others through recovery. Over time, you watch as those you once supported step up to sponsor newcomers. Your wisdom ripples out to guide the next in line.
The Business of Attention
You know what gets the majority of my enchanted attention-water? My work.
About a week ago, I found myself fielding inquiries from multiple mental health startups interested in my services. As I scrolled through their various offerings, I could clearly see the gap between what they were and what they could be.
It was a position I recognized, as my largest client had been in that same early-stage haze only three years earlier. Big ideas, scattered execution, and a product that felt more like a prototype than a solution.
Sustained, deliberate attention had been the remedy.
Every focused effort, every refinement, every iteration had compounded into something that once felt impossible—until it wasn’t. Their evolution wasn’t luck. It was a direct result of deliberate focus and an illustration of all four powers of attention in action.
Turning Chaos into Order
When I first joined the project in 2022, it was as a writer. The company’s website copy had suffered the death of a thousand edits—an incoherent jumble of mismatched voices and conflicting priorities. It was less a “brand identity” and more mad lib assembled by committee.
So, I hit reset. I stripped things back to their foundation, built a clear voice, and wove a narrative through-line that made sense. What was once an incoherent word salad became something that actually conveyed the transformative power of their offering.
Infusing Energy into Creation
Before long, my role expanded beyond fixing words. I started asking dangerous questions like, “Have you considered building something like this?” Thousands of dollars and a team of developers later, an entirely new version of their product was in the works.
I was suddenly translating abstract ideas into something people could see and build. That meant hours of deep focus—turning nebulous concepts in my head into documentation, wireframes, and metaphors that could survive contact with reality.
Healing What’s Broken
Fast forward a couple years, and cracks started showing. The product had evolved, but so had its complexities. Logical gaps in design and user flow created frustrating dead ends. Features weren’t lining up between the backend, the frontend, or the original vision.
Every day, something new needed fixing, and I approached it like a surgeon in the middle of a high-stakes operation. I carefully identified the failing systems, made precise incisions, and stitched together disconnected parts to restore function.
Nurturing Growth
But the most profound shift? Watching this tool evolve into something capable of nurturing growth in others at scale. What started as a simple interface became a psychological coach—meeting users wherever they were at.
The attention we poured into it is now reflected back in how it supports real people. There’s something beautifully recursive about it: Focused attention created a tool that, in turn, helps others direct their own attention toward healing and growth.
But forget helping others for a moment. Let’s get selfish.
Here’s the biggest reason why you should take the power of your attention more seriously…
Your Attention Builds Your Life—One Focused Moment at a Time
Consider the 16 hours you’re awake each day.
If you turned those hours into a pie chart, what would the slices look like? How much of your attention is spent on things that actually matter versus things that just happened to get your focus by default?
Alternatively, think about the environment that surrounds you or the state of your relationships. Consider how much of that current life is the accumulated consequence of how you’ve been spending your attention in the day to day?
We build our lives, minute by minute, through our attention.
This might sound strange, but it’s only because we’re unaccustomed to thinking this way. Instead, we drift through life half asleep or feeling like victims of circumstance.
This isn’t to deny random tragedies—cancer happens, meteors strike. But between catastrophes lies the vast terrain of daily choices about where to focus, and those choices determine the life you end up living.
This makes you the architect of your own reality, whether you mean to be or not.
The Essential Inventory
So, as a final tip, I suggest you start tracking what receives your attention and check whether it’s something you want more of.
Because materially speaking, life doesn’t just stop—you’re always attending to something. And energetically speaking, you’re a literal magnet, which means you’re always attracting something.
What you focus on isn’t just observed—it’s invited.
Are the trees you’re nourishing with your enchanted watering can bearing fruit that brings you joy? If not, it’s time to redirect your focus.
Simple as that.
If you’re starting to see your attention in a new light, I hope this post helped you recognize its power. If it did? Consider subscribing to The Aussie Mystic for more reflections on focus, growth, and shaping a life that actually feels like yours.