Who is controlling your “prayer”?

I have recently come across this quote from Simone Weil, a philosopher and political activist.

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.

Indeed, when we pray, we direct our attention to something, say, a virtue we want to cultivate, a sick friend who needs healing, our shortcomings, our sins, our needs, our spiritual longings, sublime epiphanies, or world peace. There is intention. There is purpose.

What if we think of daily life as prayer? What do we pay attention to? Is that the kind of prayer we want?

Prayer is an act of will. Attention is an act of will. It can be difficult to exert this will in this age of the attention economy.

If somebody else is controlling our “prayer” for things that don’t really matter to us, who benefits from that?

Who is controlling your prayer? Who is controlling your attention?

I guess we don’t need to be religious to see the wisdom of this quote from Weil.