# 24. Eli’s Circles of Attention: A Parable About Manifestation
October 21, 2025
The Memory of Saturdays
When Eli was small, Saturday afternoons belonged to him. When his four grandparents visited, he became the center of attention.
No one remembered when the ritual began. Someone would ask, “Where is Eli?” and he would be gone—hiding behind the curtain or in his room, waiting to be called. Then, on hearing them calling repeatedly, he would appear running, spinning in the center of the living room, arms open and laughing.
When he stopped spinning, dizzy and breathless, Eli clapped his hands, and everyone clapped with him. He, his parents, grandparents, and the family cats formed a circle of eyes, a loving constellation of attention. While applauding and smiling, Eli surveyed the clapping, the smiling, and the attentive eyes. It was a precious moment that lasted a few minutes. A moment shimmering with warmth. He repeated the performance a few times every Saturday afternoon.
Eli felt the joy of shared attention, freely given and freely received. It was pure delight, his first Circle of Attention.
Years later, Eli would not remember the episode when retold by the adults, but he could remember the warmth and joy of shared attention. It inhabited him. He deeply felt it and ached for it.
Hunger Times
His parents worked from home all day in front of their computers. They spent most of the days together, with the mom sitting at the dining table and the dad on the couch. Eli, in the middle, played with his toys. The three cats came and went, never wanting to be disturbed.
Eli tried to attract his parents’ attention. He built tiny circles of pebbles on the floor, stood beside his mother’s chair, or lingered by his father’s side. But the glow of the screens was stronger. The minutes stretched into hours. He was too young to name his feelings, but he carried it inside: a kind of boredom that hurt, born not of emptiness but of being unseen.
His mother’s laptop, on the dining table, glowed during the day and late into the night; his father’s computer hummed softly in the living room, though sometimes he had to go to his home office and close the door when he was on a meeting with colleagues. They worked hard and loved him deeply, but their eyes were drawn elsewhere into the glowing networks of the digital economy.
His mother sold art prints online, and his father was an engineer who designed drones. The house was filled with electronic devices which promised connection while stealing presence. The cats, patient experts in indifference, only deepened the silence. Eli initially tried to engage the cats on his daily adventures, but he retreated after being scratched twice on the face.
He was allowed only one hour of screen time a day, and, to his credit, he used it to learn how to read. He needed it as there were books in his bedroom with stories of dogs, unicorns, mice, and spiders – multiple eyes asking for the boy’s attention.
So, it happened that a few weeks after his second birthday, he read aloud the word “woven” off a box of crackers. That night, after dinner, his dad showed him flash cards they had gotten at a yard sale, planning to teach him to read. They were amazed as Eli read on cue: circle, car, happy, red, purple, tall, and more. His father whispered, “He’s not like the rest.” And his mother replied, “Then we will not treat him like one.”
That night, before going to bed, Eli started drawing circles in the air, repeating: “Circle, circle, circle.” Eli was delighted by the parents’ reaction. That weekend, he performed the same feat for the visiting grandparents. Shared attention was the best gift.
He did not have the words, but since that day, Eli’s childhood became a long apprenticeship in the art of attention. “When you attend deeply,” he said many years later, “it is as the invisible world enters the visible one. Pure magic.”
Eli’s Apprenticeship
Life gave him many more moments of shared attention.
When his mother was drawing new designs on the computer, she let him draw with her. She gave him a whiteboard where he could draw too. He drew circles, tons of them. On Sundays, she tended to her beautiful garden, and Eli was assigned small tasks appropriate to his age and abilities.
His father, a woodworker artisan at heart, built custom furniture in his spare time. He made a point of sharing with Eli as many tasks as the boy could safely handle. Eli demonstrated an eagerness to learn and soon knew how to patiently sand wood to create polished surfaces.
With his father, he learned the patience of measuring twice, the quiet between each hammer stroke. In their workshop, silence was alive; it listened. With his mother’s gardening, he learned the art of tending to life without haste. To water, wait, and trust.
Carpentry and gardening taught him that the world responds when we address it, that attention manifests new things, like flowers and chairs. Both crafts share the same rhythm, the pulse and warmth of attention. His books taught him about other eyes and other realities. He just needed to pay attention.
The Birth of Eli’s Circles of Attention
After years of study and solitude, before his twentieth birthday, Eli built his first Circle of Attention, a new technology. His father had taught him the necessary engineering; his mom had taught him about the principles of design and the impact of color and sound.
His circle was in a park near his house. It was a simple structure: a smooth, circular platform open to the sky, sensitive to movement, breath, sound, and gaze. A few concentric circles flat on the ground, barely distinguishable from a painted mural in the middle of the park. Yet, at its center lay a circle that shimmered faintly, as if reflecting something not yet visible. It was an invitation for people to enter it.
When a person entered, it responded to subtle electrical charges on their skin and the tensions in their muscles, emitting color and sound in harmony and vibration. Calm breath brought gold light; curiosity shimmered rose; shared focus deepened to blue. When attention fractured, the light splintered gently, inviting restoration. Colors form around them like mist, patterns rise like gentle waves, and sounds vibrate with harmony. Each movement, each emotion, seemed to leave a trace of color, shape, or tone.
People began to see their moods, their hopes, their hidden thoughts. The circle made them visible, not perfectly, but enough to awaken awe.
A woman who had felt forgotten saw her presence glow bright gold, erasing her self-doubt.
One man said it was “like standing inside my own silence. The circle does not want your attention - it gives it back.”
A seven-year-old girl spun in the light, laughing as colors followed her. “It’s a friend who plays with your seeing,” she told her teacher later. “It teaches you how to look.”
Two lovers came into the circle, and silvery lines joined them.
When colleagues came, strange forms mimicking their projects arose. To disgruntled visitors, the circle showed read waves of sharp sounds.
Eli reviewed the traces left in the Circle’s archive: gold for calm, rose for joy, lilac for remembrance, amber for dialogue. Each color was a form of attention made visible.
Word spread quickly. People said the circle could read the soul. But Eli said, “No. It only listens to what is already speaking.”
He wrote in his notebook: “Attention is how love behaves before it speaks.” It was then that Eli realized his invention was merely an instrument to reawaken what he once learned on those Saturday afternoons: that attention brings life into the world. ”
Epilogue — Lessons Learned
To attend is to touch the world gently enough for it to answer back. It is in that connection that we create the new.
Questions for Reflection
When was the last time you felt truly seen?
What does shared attention feel like in your body?
How might our technologies change if they were designed to give attention rather than take it?
What circles of attention already exist in your life—gardens, workshops, conversations?
How can you become, in small ways, a builder of Circles?
Thanks for listening! Feel free to reply in the comments or send a message. Until next time, I’d like you to stay thoughtful. If this story resonated with you, please share it with someone.
Iris Stammberger 2025 from "Grandma Loves AI", A Short Story Collection