I periodically reread and refresh on And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran. He writes:
Because of my blindness I had developed a new faculty. The faculty is attention. In order to live without eyes, it is necessary to be very attentive, to remain hour after hour in a state of wakefulness, of receptiveness and activity. Indeed, attention is not simply a virtue of intelligence or the result of education, it is a state of being. In its truest sense it is the listening post of the universe.
Emily Dickinson may have been living the same way when she wrote:
Forever – is composed of nows.
