The default answer ought to be no.
Because your attention is one of your most precious resources.
Attention is how we experience life.
It’s what we attend to, moment by moment, in our waking hours.
It is the focal point of our thinking.
I was recently in a workshop led by Holly Stoppit, where she shared a metaphor I’ve been turning over since:
Attention is like a little bird.
It flits around, always looking, always alert.
If we want to look after our attention, we need to give it a safe place to land.
The trouble is, there’s fierce competition to trap our little bird of attention.
And when there’s money to be made by landing it, no wonder we are surrounded by very attractive perches that call out ‘land here’.
Of course, there are places where we want our attention to land:
on a loved one
on a problem we’re chewing over,
on an idea we’ve had
or simply on something right in front of us that we’ve never noticed before.
Our attention is precious.
People don’t always ask before they take it.
But it is always yours to give.