There is a not single quality that supersedes the value of a man’s ability to concentrate. Every other virtue is a derivative of this capacity, subordinate to it, and the measure of its quality within a man ranks him along an invisible hierarchy. Every one, without exception, has woven a picture of themselves. And this self-image will argue against this notion with a fever pitch of what it assumes to be sincerity. Yet the truth is that the ability to focus one’s attention in the face of the bare moment of the ever-present reality a man finds himself in is, without question, the axel from which he can measure his own actual worth. However paradoxical it may seem, even the practice of genuine relaxation is impossible save for an intense effort in concentrating one’s attention to the muscles and the nerve endings that conjure the sense a man has of the frame of his body. When attention is not focused, when it is left to spread by the law of entropy and fade into a thin layer of nothingness, then a man is at that moment not an author of his own life. He has fallen backwards into a mechanical state which plays out his habits and accustomed behaviours in a way which convinces both himself and others that he is actually there. But he is in fact not. Concentration is what brings a man back to reality, inch by inch, and allows his consciousness to step back into the character’s shoes.