A. Prayer is an interactive communication with God about what God and I are working on together. We ask, and we listen. That's the attentiveness. The first step in listening is just to be quiet. The first task is to quiet our noisy hearts and minds.
Thoughts flit in our minds like mosquitoes, and there needs to come a kind of silencing of that.
I would encourage people, even if it's only a couple of moments, to just learn to sit attentively. We can learn to walk and pray. The ancient writers talked about working and praying. Well, we can walk and pray, and we can work and pray. You can make your commute to work a mini-retreat and be open to God bringing you what you need.