Generosity is the soft word in that sentence. Rarest is the one to check.

Weil is not praising attention. She is pricing it, and the price is that you have almost none left to give.

Count back through the week. The call where you drafted a reply while someone talked. The standup where you rehearsed your own update through everyone else's. The dinner where the phone lay face-down on the table — face-down, but still on the table, still the third party in the room.

Each of those you would describe as time given. None of them was attention given.

The other person always knows. Not from the phone, and not from your eyes — from the reply. A half-beat late, answering the sentence before the one they finished, sanded down to something that would have fit any conversation.

You cannot split attention. You can only alternate it, and hope nobody times the gaps.

Which is why Weil calls it generosity and not skill. Skill you keep. Generosity leaves your hands.

The thirty minutes you spend present with one person are thirty minutes your inbox never gets back, your own worry never gets back, the idea you would rather be chasing never gets back. That cost is the entire gift.

So today, before the week closes: one conversation, one person, nothing else open. Not the phone face-down — the phone in another room. Ask a second question, the one that only makes sense if you heard the answer to the first.

Thirty minutes is a small gift. It is also the only one nobody else can send them.