Clarity for Teachers: Day 5
‘Distractions make it harder to be clear. Avoid distractions.’
The novelist Aidan Chambers says that writing is a boring activity, so the trick is to make the rest of your life dull enough that you keep coming back to it. When Chuck Palahniuk started writing Fight Club, he’d just moved to a house in the woods in the middle of nowhere, and he decided he had to write a novel that was as exciting as the party lifestyle he had left behind. Both of them got going before there was anything like the distractions of the internet as we now know it.
I know of writers who work in a shed in the garden, out of wifi reach, and others who have a separate laptop with the modem disabled that they use to write on. I go through phases of writing the first draft of everything longhand in a notebook (though that’s not what I’m doing just now). You can even lay out $550 on a machine called a Freewrite whose selling point is that it allows you to do exactly nothing other than write.
When it comes to today’s advice, then, there’s a sigh of weary recognition. I’ve been here more times than I want to admit. What lessons do these words have that might help?
First, my hunch is that there’s power in simply naming distraction for the bane that it is. Most distractions are trivial: the passing flash of colour that catches the monkey mind, drawing the attention away from things that matter. It’s easy to make excuses, to treat the patterns of distraction and the habits that feed them as something minor: it doesn’t matter that much if I check my phone again just this one time, does it? Only in the aggregate does it matter, and only in the negative, in the cost that it adds up to. Like taking the first step in Alcoholics Anonymous, there’s a power in owning up to this cost.
Then I’m struck by the advice to avoid distractions. Say you have a problem with sugar, and there’s a sweet shop you pass each day on your way to work. You can try to grit your teeth harder as you go past, to resist the temptation through sheer willpower — or you can change the route you take to work, so as to avoid the temptation. Like yesterday’s advice about the places that make it easier to be clear, the message I get here is to arrange my life where possible so as to avoid the temptation, rather than rely on the decision I make in the moment when a distraction presents itself. (And if I put effort into arranging my life this way, there’s a strength that comes from that when I do hit one of those moments.)
Finally, I wonder what happens if I get curious about this phenomenon of distraction? I know there are times and places in which I’m easily distracted, so if I pay attention to when and where this happens, then maybe I can use it as a kind of warning system? Noticing that my capacity for distraction is threatening to kick in, I can check what else is going on in the braided knot of body, mind and relationships that answers to my name. What unease is there that is making it harder, just now, to be with myself?
Västerås, 8 March, 2020
This is the fifth in a series of commentaries on ‘A teacher’s advice on how to be clear’, Charlie Davies’s reworking of the 1000-year-old Buddhist text, ‘Advice from Atisha’s Heart’. I’m writing these as part of my participation in Clarity for Teachers, a course that Charlie is leading. You can find out more on the How To Be Clear website.
