Distra-

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is
~ TS Eliot, Four Quartets

Chris Corwin

"Lacks concentration," they said on report cards of my childhood.  They didn't know nuthin' then about the giant box of distractorama that is the interwebs.  This inability to concentrate on one thing for longer than a minute is why I flit online and open 60 different browsers at once, even though I'm only half focussed on any of them.  It's why I send off pieces of writing to editors too early.  It's why I need to meditate and why I can't start and it's why I initially wrote this blog post by hand.  The repetition that comes via things like writing by hand, and meditation, and doing the dishes, and yoga, is the new black, the constant rhythm and flow of something-that's-the-same-thing a potential ocean of cohesive peace, the opposite to the siren call of the internet.

I'm not the only one who has problems with focus.  Even without the health issues from which a lot of my attention issues stem, like many other writers I would still be battling the call of the internet and the problems that it creates when our minds are so full of other people's words it's harder to find our own.

I read on an ADHD site yesterday that when you are fully present to what is in front of you, time slows and expands.  I know this space.  It's where all the beauty happens.  It's what I'm searching for, that peace where I become so fully myself and so into the moment that I disappear.  That's eactly the reason why I used to get stoned.  Exactly it.

Sometimes I can't get to that space.  On bad health days I flail around in a hell of fractured flittering from one thing to the other, thinking I'll find somewhere to alight.  I keep trying through more distractions to reach the spaciousness and it is going in exactly the wrong direction.  I feel so stupid and clotted and at the mercy of my body, my ragged mind, my knee-jerk reactions that send me to look at Twitter, at Facebook, at the next link, when what I am craving for is to look @ No-Thing.

The No-Thing.  The fullest empty space that feels big enough to roll around in.  The space where the stories come from, and where we can hear ourselves stopping thinking. Where everything's turned to white.

River System

Pic by Neil's Photography under a CC licence

Sometimes the days are good, and you want to stay there because they are good and you feel like yourself in them (even if nothing amazing is happening) and there is a river and you're flowing in it, and it's good.  Even if not-good things are happening in it.

Call it parasympathetic nervous system.

And then there are the other days.  At those times you have to lie in bed breathing before you can get out and face the day that feels doomed, and you keep rounding the corner and falling over your very own self-hatred.  Because being you is hard for certain functional reasons where your body does not behave the way you would really like it to so as to have an enjoyable life.  You are feeling anxious.  And then you start feeling anxious about feeling anxious.  A delightful, satanic swirl of round and roundness.

Call it sympathetic nervous system.

On top of that, in trying to describe this sort of stuff you're thinking, who gives a fuck about your self-indulgent griping?  Nevertheless, that thought doesn't make the situation any easier.  It just makes it as hard as it was before and like you're being judged at the same time.  Even though you're not being judged by anybody but the nasty ones in the chorus of The Cast of Thousands (and I guess anyone who is reading this who is thinking, harden the fuck up, but if you are - I'm sure there's a few other pages on the interwebs written by people who are very strong  and who are not pussies like me).


In these days, going along with the flow is hard, even though you train yourself in the good days for days like this.

So much of life is about staying in the flow.  You used to think that the problem with swimming in the river on these sorts of days was getting your foot caught in the unseen crap on the bottom of the river.  But now you think that maybe even worse than the initial problem of getting your foot caught is the expectation you have that the riverbed should be tangle-free.   And the expectation that your life should be hassle-free, or that your body should be limitation-free.

It's the expectation that is the real causes the stress.  Wisebrain says so.