The Art of Loving on Concentration

"Concentration is by far more difficult to practice in our culture, in which everything seems to act against the ability to concentrate. The most important step in learning to concentrate is to learn to be alone with oneself without reading, listening to the radio, smoking or drinking. Indeed, to be able to concentrate means to be able to be alone with oneself--and this ability is precisely a condition for the ability to love. If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own feet, he or she may be a lifesaver, but the relationship is not one of love. Paradoxically, the abiltiy to be alone is the condition of the ability to love. Anyone who tries to be alone with himself will discover how difficult it is."

[103]

"To be concentrated in relation to others means primarily to be able to listen. Most people listen to others, or even give advice, without really listening. They do not take the other person's talk seriously, they do not take their own answers seriously either. As a result, the talk makes them tired. They are under the illusion that they would be even more tired if they listened with concentration. But the opposite is true. Any activity, if done in a concentrated fashion, makes one more awake, while every unconcentrated activity makes one sleepy--while at the same time it makes it difficult to fall asleep at the end of the day."

[105-106]
[This could have been written last night, not 1956!]

"To be concentrated means to live fully in the present ... Needless to say, that concentration must be practiced most of the day by people who love each other. They must learn to be close to each other without running away in the many ways in which this is customarily done. The beginning of the practice of concentration will be difficult; it will appear as if one could never achieve this aim. That this implies the necessity to have patience need hardly be said. If one does not know that everything has its time, and wants to force things, then indeed one will never succeed in becoming concentrated--nor in the art of loving. To have an idea of what patience is one need only watch a child learning to walk.  It falls, falls again, and falls again, and yet it goes on trying, improving, until one day it walks without falling. What could the grown-up person achieve if he had the child's patience and its concentration in the pursuits which are important to him!"

[106]

Erich Fromm