If I could choose those things over which I obsess or focus, I’d like them to be things that make me smile… things that bring me joy… things that make me understand better what it means to be human.
A counter to that way of thinking is to smile at more things, find joy in more things, recognize that every experience is a lesson in humanity.
This, in a nutshell, is my internal philosophical and spiritual debate: here vs. there, now vs. past or future, desire vs. gratitude. If I pause to consider those ways of thinking (and work to find the middle way – desire and gratitude), it influences every attempt I make at understanding myself and the world around me…. But that isn’t what this post was (or maybe is) supposed to be about. My short declarative statement begins:
I have been losing the battle for my own attention…. my own mind.
I haven’t posted much lately because I haven’t written much. I haven’t written much because I can’t seem to focus for a long enough period of time to get any mental traction. I’ve been suffering from what Buddhists refer to as monkey mind – a type of mental (and sometimes physical) restlessness. Either the dog needs something, or I fall asleep on the sofa, or my train of thought is interrupted by work, or I sabotage myself by looking at the news or social media or dating profiles. It took me over two weeks to think through the post “Failure to Launch” – and it wasn’t that good. In that same time period I tried to write about altruism and charity and what it means to have a charitable spirit/heart – giving, loving, caring unconditionally. Both pieces have been jumbled messes – paragraphs and snippets of thoughts refusing to be wrestled into submission. Only one gave way to some type of organization.
At least once or twice a week, I fall asleep on the couch at 8 or 9 o’clock at night – only to wake up briefly, a little dazed, and decide to go to bed. I used to stay up until 11 every night. I used to get up early and exercise every day. For a brief while I wrote almost every day. Now, as soon as I wake up in the morning, I’m thinking about work and the avalanche of things I need to do. I’m behind on emails and phone calls, and no matter how hard I try to dedicate time to getting caught up, I am interrupted and pulled in several different directions. On most days I feel like a child who didn’t finish any of his homework assignments for school. As a kid, that type of guilt was awful and embarrassing, but usually brief. I feel this way almost every day. It’s beginning to feel like a character flaw – like my mind isn’t designed to switch from finance to planning to correspondence to program delivery to… to… to… a few dozen times a day. Or worse, that my mind used to be able to do these things but has somehow broken down and rusted out along the side of the road to productivity. I start to wonder how some of my colleagues (executives at other organizations who seem to be managing well) do it. I usually assume that they’re smarter and more capable (which they probably are) but then I remind myself that they have staff to take care of those tasks. They have a finance person or a marketing person or a program director. This type of noise and guilt can be all-consuming. On rare occasions (Friday night at the bar, Saturday morning with coffee and a book) I’m able to completely tune out the work guilt and the work thinking and have a somewhat clear mind. The rest of the time, I’m finding, it’s nearly impossible to write when my thinking is constantly interrupted, and even harder to write if I’m asleep on the sofa.
The other morning I woke up a little before five from a work related dream. I don’t remember what it was about – I think I showed up to work and had forgotten to put my pants on and there was something about our 403b plan financial advisor or some other financial related vendor sidestepping me on some decisions that needed to be made. I spend a lot of my time pouring over numbers, finances, balance sheets, budgets, and projections – which might have influenced the dream. What a boring and pointless dream. Why couldn’t it be about exotic birds singing in the tropics under skittle-colored skies? I might as well have been dreaming about copier paper – which I think I need to order. In the hour that I was awake (and trying to write), I thought about three or four public announcements we need to make, the agenda for our annual meeting, some of the planning that needs to be done for our fundraiser in July, the reports I need to send out to the agencies we fund, and how to clear the backlog of tax returns that our volunteers are working on. And while I only thought about those things (didn’t actually work on them), I felt like I had worked a few hours. It was barely 6am.
I know that a lot of people think about work in the morning or in the evening or all the time. I’ve read about and written about the “Sunday Scaries” a few different times. I’ve written about this battle for attention more than once…. I don’t particularly like being pulled in several directions – few people do. More specifically, I don’t like feeling as though it’s somehow my fault. I sometimes think, well… if I could be more organized or more disciplined or more…. I would have a better handle on all of this. I sometimes think that I need to practice meditation because it trains the brain to tune out the intrusions. When maybe a healthier way to look at it would be to suggest that we should have fewer demands on our time and attention.
I was involved with a woman whose boss admitted that he texted his team later in the evening so that they might sleep on some ideas. That, to me, seemed a little sick – yet this notion of 24/7 access is not uncommon. And I suppose some people like to put that type of focus on their work – they like to sleep on the ideas and problems and solutions. I sometimes wonder if those people have other priorities or passions competing for their mind’s attention – or are they singularly focused? I suppose one of the questions many people struggle to answer is “how much is reasonable?” And I suspect the more baskets one has in which to put their tiny eggs of attention, the more difficult it is to strike a balance. Or put more simply, the more passions one has, the more torn one feels about having to choose.
For much of my adult life, work seemed to occupy an appropriate place. For a number of years, life was about raising a family and working to stay on the positive side of the financial ledger. We’d take a vacation once in a while. We’d go to Penn State football games. I was dutiful. I was responsible. I had lots of obligations, but I’m not sure I spent much time examining my passions. If anything, work might have been the welcome break to domestic life. But something happened in my 40s. Other interests and energies showed up. When all of those regular American life things disappeared or faded to the background (the kid grew up and the marriage ended), I found myself in a position of discovery or rediscovery. I took a few road trips, I started going to live shows, I fell in love, and few years ago I started writing again. I now find that I’ve become more protective of my non-work time and I’ve tried to impose tighter controls on my mental energies. Failing to do so is frustrating.
The other morning while driving into work, I had my music library on shuffle. The jazz classic “Dat Dere” by Art Blakey came on. I remembered the last jazz show I went to in Philadelphia. It was a spur of the moment decision made with a woman I was seeing. I then remembered how once, after a rough day and some tension between us we went to a comedy show which was exactly what we needed. The question I wrote in my phone as I was driving into work reads: are people in culturally impoverished areas more likely to have relationship difficulties? How does one escape difficult times if there are no escape routes? How does one “get their mind off of things” without meaningful outlets or distractions? I stress meaningful, not because lighthearted and shallow distractions are bad, but because in my experience, deeper distractions, more engaging distractions, can have the effect of truly resetting the soul and the conversation.
Which gets me back to my opening statements and my battle between choice, focus, gratitude, and desire. I don’t entirely dislike work – especially not the type of work I do or my specific job. What I dislike is that in our hustle and work-above-all-else society, there is little time for rest or resetting. There is always more work to do. It’s often more than can be accomplished, and we’re taught to feel like that’s our fault – the weight of which, for me, intrudes on just about everything else. Despite those observations and sentiments, I also wonder if it intrudes because I don’t have enough of “everything else” to serve as a bulwark against that type of invasiveness. There were times in my life when my first thought in the morning was one of appreciation for the person sleeping next to me, or my thoughts at night were focused on the band playing in front of me or the company I kept. There were times in my life when a crappy day, made worse by crappy traffic, was softened by the prospect of something more engaging than falling asleep and doing it all again the next day. I’ve found some refuge in my Friday night conversations at the pub. I’ve found some relief in reading and writing (both here on this blog and in poetry). But when I try to take refuge in those things (especially writing) but can’t because my monkey mind is swinging between different branches, I’m stuck with the choice of training the monkey or appreciating the branch – neither of which seem feasible because I probably have to get ready for work.