What goes on in one’s mind when one is engaged in a task? Lately, I have been playing with the idea of “focus” as a similar phenomenon to hunger. Sometimes a lack of appetite is not a concern—one may simply not be hungry; likewise, a lack of singular attention may be an indication of a lack of concern, even if only for the moment, toward a particular thing. Or here’s another comparison: there is a notion that one craves certain food depending on what sort of nutrient one is lacking at the moment; being more drawn toward something, attention-wise, may be a similar sort of symptom.
I used to have this vision of the intellectual struggle as something romantic—it was alluring to imagine a lone genius wrestling with their thoughts and pages, time passing by unbeknownst to them as if nothing else mattered besides the upstream swim through the river of ideas. I wished I could sit down at my desk and forget to stand up until eight hours later when the sun had already risen, instead of the oftentimes painful awareness of every passing minute.
One could blame contexts—technology, time, physiological states, etc.—but I endeavour to seek an understanding that is not centred on conflict. Simone Weil talks of a releasing of tension in true attention and it surprises me how I can still remember hearing/reading that despite having fallen asleep during the lecture many years ago. Those were days of struggle, I realise now. Perhaps it was not in staying still that I was in battle for then but in the wayward drift of the inability to move due to the shifting of consciousness itself. It was an upstream swim to stay awake. In one sense, that sort of lack of focus was symptomatic, the prognosis being sleep deprivation, among others. Yet one can argue that such can happen to one face-to-face with an idea too complex—no matter how well-rested one is, some problems just seem to ask to be slept over.
Complexity is another interesting phenomenon because it is necessarily relative yet it comes always cloaked in the illusion of exactitude. What “easy” and “difficult” mean may be straightforward regardless of circumstances but in practice, their manifestations are contingent on everything else. ABCs are difficult for a lot of children and some adults, as are integers and imaginary numbers.
Back to attention: it is not like we ever left, however. Does attention or “focus” always need an object? If so, then perhaps one can say that in discussing some of its objects one is already discussing itself, or at least, is on the way to getting to know it better.
That is another point to the concept of “focus”: it is deflective, which may be why it becomes so difficult to control, that is, to force it to happen. The more one tries to pay attention to one thing, the more the plethora of the other things that are not the one to be focused on becomes visible, sensible, in a way more perceptible to the senses. The air becomes palpably warmer, the most minute details larger, the quietest whispers turn into the loudest noises that refuse to be ignored, in contrast to the line of text or train of thought that used to be right in front of one’s eyes but has since escaped to another dimension.
There are many other cases of struggle with this, but let us turn to hope: those days when time seems to flow like honey as one absorbs one sentence after another from a riveting book. What leads to moments of ease when it comes to doing something usually difficult—as when one writes and every word seems to follow the other effortlessly? During these times, one seems to be able to focus without trying at all and I reckon this is how “focus” truly is or ought to be.
Still, a similar productive/fruitful effortlessness comes in those moments of diffused attention—I would like to call these rare, but that might not be the case; this might be the more natural/common phenomenon: in approaching a task as an act of grazing, one has a problem at hand and instead of wrestling with it, a look of laser-focused eyes and all, one lets one’s vision drift to the clouds gently dancing ahead, or to the sound of the blowing wind, or to the “distracting” invitations that surrounds one. My hypothesis is that focus ought not be controlled on the conscious level but in a manner simpler and more subdued. Instead of focusing the senses to direct themselves toward a singular direction or object only, which is highly unnatural and may even be a dangerous habit to develop (senses are meant to get signals that keep one healthy and safe and so necessitates a mode of alertness toward a diffused coverage), perhaps we can embrace the “scattered awareness” that comes about when it does. We might ask ourselves why in the first place our body/sense thinks we need to be on the lookout. Is there anything that the body is taking as a clue that there is danger nearby?
In such cases, regardless of the presence of danger, we can keep focus on our intention, or if the awareness is in the sense, this may reside in the heart. The focus can at a moment be health—if right now one simply wants to rest, one so turns toward acts/spaces that are restful. At times this may mean lying down, at times standing up, and at other times addressing the friend telling one a random story spontaneously. In all these instances, though there is a lack of prolonged stillness directed toward a particular point, one remains focused and does so without having to struggle against the environment that sometimes seems to go against one’s intentions.
Applying this to work, say writing, one may intend to write about a singular topic “attention” and so one sits down at their desk and begins to write. Eventually after a paragraph or so, one might notice a yellow butterfly passing by and one watches the fluttering with a gentle gaze before returning to their pen and paper and continuing to think about attention. Then as people start to wake in one’s household, one greets and acknowledges their presence, at times sharing a few minutes with them discussing matters, some trivial, some of a level of urgency, and allowing themselves to slowly return to the topic at hand once the stimuli have passed.
In all these things, two ideas are important. One is trust: one needs faith in oneself that one holds the highest good for one; that when the ears turn one’s attention to a distant noise, they are doing so not merely to distract oneself from doing more important things but for better reasons, whether that is safety or curiosity. Or even if it is to distract oneself, that the distraction is not because one is a reprehensible, undisciplined individual but perhaps one can focus on the need to be distracted that is being indicated at the moment is for something worth looking into even if that means being ‘taken away’ from one’s work.
One also needs to trust oneself that one would be able to do what one needs to do if the doing truly is essential, and that one would be able to do so properly, to the best of one’s abilities without exerting too much. One trusts that one would continue breathing without worrying that holding one’s breath temporarily would cause one to permanently struggle with respiration.
However, perhaps some things would be more difficult to accomplish without practice. Trust still that the body has the mechanisms to remember what it needs to remember. One need not constantly speak to know a language. One need not always watch a movie to understand motion pictures. Understand too the necessity of rest. The pauses bring all the notes together to make music, and so does any kind of rest with work/creation/focusing.
The second point is that such a manner of doing things would inevitably take more time. One may be able to more “efficiently” use one’s cognitive faculties through techniques that train one’s mind and sense to focus but doing so also seeks more energy expenditure at shorter intervals. It may be quicker but can it be done for longer?
Either means are significant but their significance is contingent on other things. When one can easily focus on the one thing one needs to focus on, one may not at the moment need answers to questions like this; however, it is when one’s attention is scattered that the time is opportune for asking why such is the case. Are there too many interests and a lack of clarity? Is there too little desire for anything of significance? Is one’s physiological state not appropriate or in the right condition to ask such things?
Sometimes, the call is not even to ask these questions but may simply be to gain awareness of such things. Or even just awareness of the diffusion of attention—that perhaps every afternoon, one’s thoughts get scattered and that is simply how things are. The idea is to not immediately see these instances as problems to solve or of flaws of character but at the very least neutral/harmless quirks one may have to live with. At best these are strengths to try to take advantage of.
The developing “attention economy” is pushing the notion of economising/capitalising our focus—of pushing for the need to “make the most” of our “limited attention spans” and ensure that they are used for good. This “good” however is often limited to economic good perhaps largely because that is the easiest to quantify and it is the very framework that the idea of attention economy is based on.
This may lead to negative feelings toward things that do not seem to use “attention” in a “productive” manner. That one ought not to be distracted by the “trivial” when one is doing something “important.”
But where does the importance come from? For what sake do we do these major tasks of significance? More than likely there is a desire to be able to turn to the trivial—to simply live (to live, simply), to enjoy, to play. We do the important ones with the hope that they would one day free us to do what is deemed unimportant but we nonetheless desire.
So in the end, the question is: why? So what is it all for? And all the answers follow.