When I was younger I used to play the flute. For hours and hours and hours on end. No one would ever have to tell me to 'go to your room and practice'. I just did. And I'd stand at the top of the stairs playing Faure's Pavane or Debussy's L'Apres Midi or some suite by Telemann, indulging in every note and the acoustics of our high ceilinged hallway. Totally engrossed. Totally immersed.
Later, when I went off to university to study Philosophy, reading and note taking in the library had the same effect. I would study for hours - actual page turning, content digesting, mind mapping study. Totally engrossed. Totally immersed.
Now, I struggle to read a single page of a book. I watch TV with a phone in my hand. I have no real hobbies to speak of. I cannot focus.
Of course memories are by their nature tinted things, nostalgic rose or otherwise. But even so I am convinced that this immersion happened, that these times in my life were the last time I genuinely found it easy to really allow myself to focus in such a full sense of the word.
So what happened? At what point did 16 year old me, or even 21 year old me become someone who is now so easily distracted? Someone who actually looks at those 'estimated reading time' notifications at the top of online articles and winces if it says it's more than 5 minutes? Someone who can’t watch a film without googling an actor or hopping onto IMDB to look up the trivia?
When - and why - did I lose the ability to be engrossed?
There’s no doubt in my mind that technology has at least played some part in this. I don’t know where scientific research stands on this but I’m convinced that with the advent of mobiles, more frequent internet use and the explosion of social media we’ve all experienced a kind of rewiring of our brains. Absorption and concentration have been replaced with click-bait distractions, swiping screens and flashing pop-ups. It seems fairly obvious to me that with all this background noise we can’t help but lose our focus. We think differently because we experience the world differently.
The increased anxieties and stresses which accompany this faster paced way of living surely don’t help either. It’s hard to truly engross yourself in something when there’s that little voice nagging in the back of your mind about all the things you should really be worrying about. Like whether you’re spending too much time on Facebook and should take a ‘Social Media Holiday’, whether you’ll win that eBay item you’ve been bidding on or should have just gone for the ‘Buy Now’ option, or whether you remembered to put Coco Pops on the Morrisons online shop before you checked out. You know, really important stuff.
And on a personal level, becoming a parent has perhaps had the biggest impact on my ability to focus on any single thing for any period of time. Parenting, it seems to me, is ALL about multi-tasking, and hence the very antithesis of focus. Cooking dinner / putting on a washload / washing up / preparing a bath / scraping food off the floor from the previous meal / trying to reset the TV settings so crying, cranky and food flinging baby can watch a bit of CBeebies to keep them quiet so as to get things done – all executed whilst simultaneously singing “I am the music man’ (with actions, oh yes) in order to distract said baby from the indignity of having to sit in a high chair, and all within a time space of about five minutes? Yeah, that feels like being a parent. On a quiet day.
So, with all of this to consider, it’s probably not really any wonder that I don’t often find myself indulging, engrossed, in hours of activity anymore. There’s just too much distraction out there.
This time of year seems to me a good time to reflect on these things, perhaps even to force us. After all the tinsel decked, mulled wine drenched, pine needle prickling intensity of Christmas those days afterwards become one long weekend. Everything slows down. No-one really knows what day of the week it is. And there’s still that panettone in the kitchen cupboard, unwrapped and untouched. We can’t help but lounge around and digest for a bit – in every sense of the word.
Amidst the lull the new year beckons us with the promise of fresh starts supposedly around the corner. We start planning – holidays, house moves, resolutions. “2017 will be the year that I really…(insert good intentions here). This year, perhaps even more than ever, we all seemed to want to wish away the old year and see in the new, hopeful that the chime of midnight would herald in new opportunities, renewed resilience, a new kind of world. But then New Year’s day arrives, and we’re all too hungover and tired to really follow through on those resolutions (“Not today, it’s still technically the Christmas holidays, right?”) and the world in which we passed out in bed is pretty much the same world this morning, perhaps with a few more used fireworks laying about and with slightly less stocks of paracetamol available in the average bathroom cabinet.
Still, the desire to start a new year with real and meaningful change is a strong one. And even if it does seem fairly ludicrous that we traditionally assign ourselves this one annual opportunity to ‘start again’, to ‘resolve to be different’, these kind of good intentions still remain good. They are worthwhile.
So, in the midst of Christmas and New Year this year, having over-indulged my nostalgic yearning for hours and hours spent ‘just doing stuff I like’ as much as I over-indulged my appetite for Quality Street, I had a bit of a moment of realisation. A moment of resolve.
It’s not about having a hobby, or studying, or even about trying to escape the noise of our busy technology driven lives. It’s about presence. About being in the moment.
The reality is that I can’t go back in time to a moment in my life when, being young and free from responsibility, I could – if I wanted – do whatever the hell I like for hours on end. It’s unlikely that the outside influences of 21st Century living are going to go away, or even quieten down for a bit. And I probably won’t ever be able to entirely escape that little nagging voice in my mind that makes me worry about things, nonsensical or otherwise. These things will always be there, distracting and pulling focus. But ultimately I have to take responsibility for how much I let them.
So my resolution this year? My Christmas present to myself? Presence. I resolve to find the small moments of joy in just stopping and thinking about what I’m doing. To pause more and take note of when and how I get distracted and try to overcome those influences as much as possible. For myself I hope for this to lead to some inner peace in living more in the moment, and for my daughter I hope to help model for her the joy in life which can be found in immersing yourself in something you love.
Will I succeed in keeping my resolution this year? Will I make it to next December, or even till the end of the month? Well, who knows. Let’s just take one day at a time shall we?
Later, when I went off to university to study Philosophy, reading and note taking in the library had the same effect. I would study for hours - actual page turning, content digesting, mind mapping study. Totally engrossed. Totally immersed.
Now, I struggle to read a single page of a book. I watch TV with a phone in my hand. I have no real hobbies to speak of. I cannot focus.
Of course memories are by their nature tinted things, nostalgic rose or otherwise. But even so I am convinced that this immersion happened, that these times in my life were the last time I genuinely found it easy to really allow myself to focus in such a full sense of the word.
So what happened? At what point did 16 year old me, or even 21 year old me become someone who is now so easily distracted? Someone who actually looks at those 'estimated reading time' notifications at the top of online articles and winces if it says it's more than 5 minutes? Someone who can’t watch a film without googling an actor or hopping onto IMDB to look up the trivia?
When - and why - did I lose the ability to be engrossed?
There’s no doubt in my mind that technology has at least played some part in this. I don’t know where scientific research stands on this but I’m convinced that with the advent of mobiles, more frequent internet use and the explosion of social media we’ve all experienced a kind of rewiring of our brains. Absorption and concentration have been replaced with click-bait distractions, swiping screens and flashing pop-ups. It seems fairly obvious to me that with all this background noise we can’t help but lose our focus. We think differently because we experience the world differently.
The increased anxieties and stresses which accompany this faster paced way of living surely don’t help either. It’s hard to truly engross yourself in something when there’s that little voice nagging in the back of your mind about all the things you should really be worrying about. Like whether you’re spending too much time on Facebook and should take a ‘Social Media Holiday’, whether you’ll win that eBay item you’ve been bidding on or should have just gone for the ‘Buy Now’ option, or whether you remembered to put Coco Pops on the Morrisons online shop before you checked out. You know, really important stuff.
And on a personal level, becoming a parent has perhaps had the biggest impact on my ability to focus on any single thing for any period of time. Parenting, it seems to me, is ALL about multi-tasking, and hence the very antithesis of focus. Cooking dinner / putting on a washload / washing up / preparing a bath / scraping food off the floor from the previous meal / trying to reset the TV settings so crying, cranky and food flinging baby can watch a bit of CBeebies to keep them quiet so as to get things done – all executed whilst simultaneously singing “I am the music man’ (with actions, oh yes) in order to distract said baby from the indignity of having to sit in a high chair, and all within a time space of about five minutes? Yeah, that feels like being a parent. On a quiet day.
So, with all of this to consider, it’s probably not really any wonder that I don’t often find myself indulging, engrossed, in hours of activity anymore. There’s just too much distraction out there.
This time of year seems to me a good time to reflect on these things, perhaps even to force us. After all the tinsel decked, mulled wine drenched, pine needle prickling intensity of Christmas those days afterwards become one long weekend. Everything slows down. No-one really knows what day of the week it is. And there’s still that panettone in the kitchen cupboard, unwrapped and untouched. We can’t help but lounge around and digest for a bit – in every sense of the word.
Amidst the lull the new year beckons us with the promise of fresh starts supposedly around the corner. We start planning – holidays, house moves, resolutions. “2017 will be the year that I really…(insert good intentions here). This year, perhaps even more than ever, we all seemed to want to wish away the old year and see in the new, hopeful that the chime of midnight would herald in new opportunities, renewed resilience, a new kind of world. But then New Year’s day arrives, and we’re all too hungover and tired to really follow through on those resolutions (“Not today, it’s still technically the Christmas holidays, right?”) and the world in which we passed out in bed is pretty much the same world this morning, perhaps with a few more used fireworks laying about and with slightly less stocks of paracetamol available in the average bathroom cabinet.
Still, the desire to start a new year with real and meaningful change is a strong one. And even if it does seem fairly ludicrous that we traditionally assign ourselves this one annual opportunity to ‘start again’, to ‘resolve to be different’, these kind of good intentions still remain good. They are worthwhile.
So, in the midst of Christmas and New Year this year, having over-indulged my nostalgic yearning for hours and hours spent ‘just doing stuff I like’ as much as I over-indulged my appetite for Quality Street, I had a bit of a moment of realisation. A moment of resolve.
It’s not about having a hobby, or studying, or even about trying to escape the noise of our busy technology driven lives. It’s about presence. About being in the moment.
The reality is that I can’t go back in time to a moment in my life when, being young and free from responsibility, I could – if I wanted – do whatever the hell I like for hours on end. It’s unlikely that the outside influences of 21st Century living are going to go away, or even quieten down for a bit. And I probably won’t ever be able to entirely escape that little nagging voice in my mind that makes me worry about things, nonsensical or otherwise. These things will always be there, distracting and pulling focus. But ultimately I have to take responsibility for how much I let them.
So my resolution this year? My Christmas present to myself? Presence. I resolve to find the small moments of joy in just stopping and thinking about what I’m doing. To pause more and take note of when and how I get distracted and try to overcome those influences as much as possible. For myself I hope for this to lead to some inner peace in living more in the moment, and for my daughter I hope to help model for her the joy in life which can be found in immersing yourself in something you love.
Will I succeed in keeping my resolution this year? Will I make it to next December, or even till the end of the month? Well, who knows. Let’s just take one day at a time shall we?
