Starved For Attention

starved-for-attention A school teacher told me this morning that my child was starved for attention. The implication made was that despite her best efforts, I was apparently ineffective as an attentive parent.

Taking some deep breaths to cleanse the energy, I wonder what does it mean to be starved for attention. Is it not this yearning for recognition that is the driving force behind all that we do every day?

From the moment we are born into the world our lungs cry out to be noticed. There seems to be a biological need for us to reach out and latch on as we find our way in this most uncertain of illusions.

For some of us, our attention seeking behavior takes on socially acceptable forms of obsessive compulsive disorder, like the child who gets straight A’s, or wins the most sports trophies, or has the largest list of social networking friends. For others, our starving ego takes the form of destructive habits and addictions. Are not the tattooed sleeves, eyebrow pierces, magenta streaked locks or the yellow Corvette, Gucci clutch and the Prada sneakers all just really calls to be noticed?

Network ratings and mass media blitz is all a buzz about being the center of your attention. Small wonder we have a pharmaceutical fortune invested in ways to cure exuberance when it doesn’t fit into the ideals of a societal system based on the values forged during the cold war.

Yet ego starving may be exactly what is needed as we take steps into the realm of unity consciousness and realize our perceived troubles are maintained mostly inside our own conditioned minds. For it is only when we see our Self in the eyes of another and realize deeply that the root of our suffering is a lack of Self love, then and then only can we feed the hungry, shelter the homeward bound and begin to provide comfort to all sentient beings.

So as the cliché goes …

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