It is important to learn the difference between staying with an experience until it is completed and hanging on, trying to get something more-anything more-from a situation which is either finished or barren. The basic clues are whether attention to the issue is loose, unfixed, mobile attentiveness or whether it is an attentiveness which feels glued to its object. The people with the bug-eyed stare, the clinging grasp, the insistent preoccupations, the sense of desperation, the ready-made sermons, the unwillingness to leave when conversations are finished, the quoting of authorities, etc. are all hanging on.

— Erving Polster

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