Avoiding the Void by Sitting Down and Facing it.
The wealth and breadth of ingredients that make the day function as well as possible is vast. No matter how many aspects there are to my day, there is an underlying essential ingredient — the elephant in the room — which is attention, but more importantly, the quality of that attention. My current attention crisis can be measured by how resistant I am in my need to get up and do something else. This particular kind of distraction occurs when I’ve reached a creative high point, something unexpected; I just get up and walk away merrily in the glow of my perceived creative peak. Getting up and doing something else is like a reward, but there’s no getting away from it, my attention is lost. Come to think of it, I also get up and do something else if I’m in a creative low point;
Creative high point = endorphin high = getting up and doing something else as a reward = not attending to whatever it is I am supposed to be doing.
Creative low point = getting up and doing something else as a pacifier = not attending to whatever it is I am supposed to be doing.
It’s an ongoing battle; a minute by minute urge to get up and do something else when I should just be sitting down and making the best use of my time by attending to what it is that I’m supposed to be doing. Obviously, the best thing to do when the urge to move strikes is to choose not to get up. Even if I found myself sat at my desk not doing anything (I mean nothing at all, no looking at screens, no texting, no reading) that was better than getting up and walking off to so something else. The best way to achieve this was to apply some strict rules; switch off the internet, close down all other software apart from the one I need to do the job and continue to sit down for a set period of time. After a while, sitting and not doing anything gets a bit tedious, so the ‘doing’ of something becomes much more attractive; after some focused attention I am further able to resist the urge to leave my desk.
Sitting and resisting obviously takes up more energy than getting up and making a coffee, but it gets easier; that’s the practice. Getting up is easy but focussing on a very present awareness of not succumbing to the urge to get up is not. Whether leaving my desk is a result of a creative high or indeed an inspirational low, the result is longer periods spent away from learning and achieving.
My distractions are merely excuses, excuses which excuse me from challenging myself and stepping into the unknown. My brain is constantly looking for something ‘sweeter’, easier and familiar; it’s not keen on beating a new path and heading into the uncharted territory of sitting and doing something for longer than the usual set periods of time; at the very least I would achieve more by doing nothing at all; not being needlessly distracted is the goal.
When I get to this place — a place of undistracted solitude — I am ecstatic for having made an effort and succeeded; this is the real endorphin rush. A high based on sticking at something and gaining some ground, no matter the distance travelled. A time period whereby I would typically have moved from my desk to re-arrange my other desk via the kitchen to make a coffee and eat some cake. Instead, I am sat at my desk facing the ‘void’, not avoiding it.
I thrive on doing lots of different things, but attending to one thing at a time has always been the focus; read when reading, look when looking, talk when talking and dream while daydreaming. The real task is to master the ‘doing’ for increasing periods of time (maybe not the daydreaming part) by way of incremental adjustments. The quality of attention is measured by how much the creative self is nurtured and stimulated; fully appreciating everything that feeds it. No matter what the activity, if the quality of attention is as near to 100% as possible, then it was time well spent. Such a simple thing as paying attention — to attention — makes the journey much more enjoyable. The risk of getting up and doing something else is massively reduced and eventually omitted from the equation which is time well spent. Attention is time well spent, lack of attention is a total waste of time.
Even when I opt to do very little, I am giving ‘it’ my full attention. I wrote an article some time ago that touched on this, but it now seems much more straightforward. Now that distraction of social media and any kind of media outside of that which I mean to pay attention to, is under some sort of control, it frees me up to be more consistent in paying attention to the things that benefit me; and by switching off the internet and removing myself from other stimuli for set periods of time, the process of sitting still for longer is much more achievable.
It would seem to be a simple case of awareness. It’s taken me quite a ‘run-up’ to get to this point; some delving, a good deal of practice; a series of step by step processes that have revealed a less complicated and much more straightforward path.
Attention is essential for learning, but what is more critical is the length of uninterrupted time spent on attention. Currently, the optimum attention span seems to be just a little bit longer than the last time, which is time well spent indeed.
