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Good Morning. National Theatre Director Rufus Norris described this week how it’s very difficult to strike the right balance between the brilliance of writers and the anxiety which affects audiences needing to catch the last train home. Anyone who’s been to any theatre and found themselves glancing at their watch as the production in front of them shows no sign of winding up will know exactly what he means. Whilst not all theatre offerings of course are necessarily that long, some recent National Theatre productions have ranged from 5 hours and 10 minutes to a little over 3 hours. And next month a version of Robert le Page’s poignant play The Seven Streams of the River Ota will run for 7 hours complete with a dinner break. The surprising thing is that these long and often complex pieces of theatrical writing are counter-cultural. Today, most people when presenting anything to fellow professionals inevitably argue that shorter is better. Say what you want to say succinctly and you are much more likely to succeed. In my own recent university research on digital audiences, and what fashions them, I established that a so-called digital generation is increasingly distracted. A survey undertaken a few years ago found that the average attention span had dropped from 12 seconds [in the year 2000] to just 8 seconds. The same survey concluded that the human attention span is fast becoming the most scare of human commodities. A few weeks ago in a conversation with some theology students in Oxford I discussed what role faith can play in resurrecting our ability to concentrate and be attentive to what’s going on around us. And round the table we all acknowledged that in many of our church communities the clamour for mindfulness, reflection or to “Be Still and know that I am God ” [as the Book of Psalms urges] is as tough a challenge now as it has ever been. Certainly, what many people I come across are saying to me, and with increasing volume, is that they are determined to correct their life balance; to reclaim their attention spans from the lost luggage locker marked temporal and short term. Back at the theatre, this time at the Old Vic, in a happy, quite recent musical version I saw of the hit movie Groundhog Day, where every day is the same as the previous one, the hero Phil Connors proclaims: “Well what happens if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today!”. Yet every day is a fresh chance for us to give proper attention to withdrawing at times from the fast moving, ever-changing, digital world and to be attentive both to the world around us and to those who love, care or rely on us.