It’s all about attention and listening. Pay attention and listen. Listen to everything, listen to absolutely everything. Listen to the sounds you don’t want to hear, listen to the ones you do want to hear, listen to the people talking around you. I heard this wonderful thing this morning about taking the bus. Every so often, I was saying to Paula, the last time as we went through New York, I used to love riding on the subway, because I don’t have to have something to read, I just am sort of fascinated by everybody around me, what they’re saying and what they’re doing. It’s paying attention, but it’s listening, listening. And all of a sudden you hear something, and it may be a phrase that you’ve heard over and over again, but suddenly it’s got electricity in it, you know. And those are the notes you take out. What is that little charge in there and where does it want to go? You may not even know what it’s about, but it’s all about, if you tried to write something new all of the time — as I have — all your life, it seems to change. If you’re telling the truth in the essential place where you don’t know, it really is all you that is coming out and nobody else could write it, and that’s what you want. That’s what you want to make students see, listen. Chuang Tzu — who was a great Taoist, as much as almost 3,000 years ago — said, “When I say that someone is good at hearing, I do not mean that they are good at hearing anything else. I mean that they are good at hearing themselves.” That’s what the attention is about. And however smart you are, if you get distracted from that you’re going to end up in an unhappy place, I think.