When you think of meditation, you probably envision a serene hillside, a quiet butterfly or two, and a person sitting silently, legs crossed, in total perfection. I meditate in my basement. It’s freezing cold, there is usually at least one cricket on the ground near me, and I sit in front of my TV (turned off). But it works. A few days ago, I was meditating with the baby monitor nearby.

One of the most simple questions remains of the most profound mysteries in life. How are you? I’m fine. But if you’re really thinking about it, really taking every little comment literally, you might get swept up in your own thoughts. You could, when someone asks, take mental stock of your mood, your tense body parts, your clenched fists. You could, when someone asks, tell them that that you’re somewhere in between hope and fear, that the question is somewhat irrelevant since that’s where all of us are.

It’s been discussed in many books that humans are driven by narrative. That even when we think we’re being rational and logical, we’re really just validating the stories we tell ourselves. Data can prove almost anything, it turns out. A friend of mine once referred to these instances as “cognitive errors.” But to a technologist, an error means that a system didn’t work as designed. But that’s not the case with the brain: it was “designed” to tell stories, to complete narratives.

When I was 11, I visited my uncle in England. We were moving into his house and he told me he was ordering a new computer. I got really excited to play games on it. When it arrived, it came in various boxes. It turned out my uncle, to save money, had ordered computer parts. With very little time to deal with the computer, he tasked me with building. “…build a computer?

If we pay someone, we’re handing them currency in exchange for something of equal value. So what happens then, when we pay attention? We hand over the currency of our awareness, of the present moment. In exchange, we expect something of equal value. In the cases where my attention payment has resulted in something of equal value, I’ve learned a life lesson, or seen something provocative. Something within me has changed.