Simplicity is power

….but takes discipline and true focus

Dear friend

Like many of us, I often find the world overwhelming. There’s a lot to do and a thousand distractions between me and the doing of any of it. There’s too many tasks and too much noise. Too many ‘needs’, and too many social roles I feel I have to play.

Distraction.

Yet when I quieten my mind and nervous system, I find I need relatively little. When I imagine (or fantasise about) an ‘other’, ‘calmer’ life, I don’t imagine scrolling on Social Media or tackling my infinitely expanding to-do list. When I imagine a different life, I imagine simplicity: being in nature, talking with friends, painting a picture.

I try to start each day quietly. I retreat to bed with coffee and, for an hour or so, I read, study or write. Especially in winter, it’s dark outside. Often I’m wrapped in the sound of wind or rain on the roof.

It’s a cocoon, a bubble of quietude. In it I focus into a single thing, and allow the myriad voices of distraction to quieten.

Often in that time of not-thinking-about-things, I find clarity about areas of the coming day about which I’ve felt indecisive. Insight emerges when I consciously avoid the siren-song of distraction and junk.

Social media is junk. Much ‘entertainment’ is junk. Many of the consumer goods we’re encouraged to spend our money on, are junk.

As in ‘junk food’, I mean junk as something that gives an immediate hit of satisfaction and relief, while doing no long-term good, and quite possibly considerable long-term harm.

Much of my thinking is ‘junk’: tedious, outdated stories about who I am and how the world is, that serve to reinforces my familiar sense of self, but not enable me to move on, or move deeper.

The antidote to junk is ‘real. To make something real requires investment of discipline and attention. If you want not to eat junk food, you need to spend time to make real food. If you want not to think junk thoughts, you need to discipline yourself into better thoughts. If you want to make real art, you need to commit time to developing your vision and skill.

Real things do not emerge from distraction.

Yet distraction is the currency that enriches the parasite corporations and institutions that feed on us - including the political and media worlds. They need us distracted, dissatisfied, eager for quick answers to complex needs.

The psychologist Adler (contemporary of Freud and Jung) wrote of ‘self-reliance’ as the highest human capacity. Not raw, narcissistic individualism, but self-reliance within frameworks of collective and interpersonal relationship.

This seems to me important: to empower myself within a network of interpersonal and ecological respect and responsibility.

Short-term fixes to deep seated needs are junk: the need soon returns and the underlying health of the system is weakened. Long term fixes - or growth - come from committing the time to quiet, self-reliant focus.

‘But I don’t have time’ I have to work, I have to earn money, I have to honour my commitments, I have to go to the gym, I have to, I have to, I have to….’ The voices of obligation and powerlessness can be very strong and insistent in my head,. The truth is this: many of the things I think I ‘have to do’, I do not actually have to do.

I do not have to spend my time and attention on things that other people, big corporations, or terrified parts of myself, tell me I should.

I can decide. I can choose. I can cook something better than junk to live on.

To do so requires, before everything else, this simple choice: that I will take ownership of, and responsibility for, my attention. I will direct it away from distraction and towards empowerment and whatever enrichment I need to pursue.

In the quietness of the morning, still dark outside, I find the ‘light on the hill’ that we yearn to walk towards when we’re lost, is burning inside of me. It’s called ‘attention’. It’s our deepest human power.

The texture of my life is defined by what I pay attention to, and the sort of attention I choose to pay.

My power lies in being deliberate and disciplined in how I weave my life-texture into the tapestry of this world, every, single day.