Everything. All At Once.

My therapist used the word “hyper-vigilant” to describe the state in which I seem to spend most of my time. I strive — however hopelessly — to know everything about everything around me, to anticipate the next action that everyone might take, the next thing they might say, and the next and the next on into the future. I read invisible tea leaves in the unspoken, the sideways glances, the strange alliances of a casual conversation between two others, and the very feeling of the air around me when I walk in or out of a room.
I’m not paranoid, as far as I can tell, I am just trying to bring together two very distinct characteristics of myself and this hyper-vigilance is what has emerged. Becoming truly aware of it, and understanding how to use it, is the impetus behind this article.
One of the characteristics driving this state is being hearing impaired. I was first diagnosed in college with sensory neural hearing loss (it just happens, tends to run in families) and began wearing hearing aids a few years later. Since then, my hearing has grown progressively worse (fortunately the rate of decline appears to have slowed as I age) and my hearing aids have grown progressively more powerful and sophisticated. (Hearing aids and the entire industry around them is a topic for another post.)
If you are not hearing impaired, you may not fully understand all the little things that can escape my notice. Phones beeping, tiny tinny computer speakers, people speaking softly with their hands in front of their mouth, someone calling out at me from behind on a busy street. Even with the best hearing aids available, I miss many sounds in the world around me. Some of those sounds are incidental and trivial; some of those sounds could mean life or death under the right circumstances.
One of the talents that people with hearing loss develop is lip reading. Very good lip reading (I am looking at you, person in the sixth row when I am presenting, saying “I disagree with this bozo” quietly to the person next to you.) combined with the ability to anticipate what someone may say next based on what I have just heard, what they have said before, and other contextual cues. Not being able to hear fully means that I watch and see very intently.
This hyper-vigilance every day, in every situation, is not easy. It requires considerable mental energy to pay attention to everything and to also be able to think about the information I am gathering. You may not believe that people can multitask, but I do it continuously.
The other primary characteristic that I believe drives my hyper-vigilance is my experience and skill as a strategist. Strategy as a job can be difficult to explain and difficult to understand, and every strategist approaches the role uniquely. For me, it is fundamentally about being able to see patterns across a wide field of often disparate information and then determine all the possible outcomes from those patterns. In other words, pay attention to everything, all at once.
I consider myself a good strategist and have had reasonable success over the years. Key to operating across a variety of types of business situations is consuming vast quantities of information daily on many different topics. This information feeds the engine that looks for the patterns and makes the connections. Recall of obscure facts is a personal specialty (as is forgetting the most common facts, like someone’s name or the current month).
So, here I am, watching the entire world for fear I might miss something being said and trying to know everything and piece together a picture of the world that might be in the near future. I live in a state of constant attention punctuated by moments of relaxation. Everything is being processed and re-processed and analyzed and over-analyzed endlessly.
Recently, the character Petyr Baelish (Littlefinger) on “Game of Thrones” made a statement that aptly sums up my world:
“Don’t fight in the North or the South. Fight every battle everywhere, always, in your mind. Everyone is your enemy, everyone is your friend. Every possible series of events is happening all at once. Live that way and nothing will surprise you. Everything that happens will be something that you’ve seen before.”
This gave me a real thrill when he said it, instantly resonating with my own view of the world. I may not be in a state of war (nor am I as power hungry and conniving as Littlefinger)but I am trying to avoid surprises. At this stage of life, I have seen a lot of what happens before. My hyper-vigilance may come across to others as being (in)tense, paranoid, or playing some personal game of thrones. Those perception are rooted in just seeing the outward manifestation of what I have come to accept as a fundamental survival skill. I am this way so that I can be successful at work, helpful to friends and family, and able to sleep at night (mostly).
We are all striving to cope with the world. None of us is perfect, and in those imperfections we often find new strengths. The blind listen closely to things others may miss; the deaf watch faces for traces of emotions not conveyed through other channels; the old rely on a lifetime of experience to know what might happen next; and the young see solutions illuminated only by eager naivete. I watch everything, all at once.
