1: “Suppose it’s 4.10 pm, on a day when it’s not my turn for school pickup,” Oliver Burkeman writes in Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.
“I’m focusing hard in my office at home,” Oliver notes, “when my son bursts in, to tell me excitedly of his preparations for the school play.”
Here is one of those moments of wonderful connection, “the kind of thing life’s supposed to be about,” he writes.
“Except that if my time-boxing plan deems 4 pm to 5 pm an hour for deep focus,” Oliver notes, “then his entrance is suddenly an intrusion, one more minor way in which my day has gone wrong.”
What if he’d spend the five minutes before 4 pm doing a “focus meditation, entering a state of mental quiet in preparation for my hour of concentration”?
His son’s arrival would seem even more unsettling.
2: “On a larger scale,” Oliver writes, “we can fall into the trap of viewing our whole lives this way, interpreting all the things we’re actually doing with our days as one extended series of interruptions or distractions from what we think we’re meant to be doing with them.”
Seeing life this way also becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: “It makes ever more people and things feel like they must indeed be held at bay, if we’re ever to get a moment to hear ourselves think.”
In reality, certain things happen. Then, other things happen. Then, still more things happen.
Who’s to say which events should be sorted “into hard categories of those which ought and ought not to happen”? he wonders.
“There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with that,” Oliver notes. “It’s fine to have strong preferences for how we’d like our day to unfold. But at the very least, it’s a reminder not to cling so confidently to those preferences that we turn life into a constant struggle against events we’ve decided, futilely, shouldn’t be happening.
Who’s to say if this or that interruption might actually prove to be a welcome development?
Zen teacher John Tarrant observes that we talk about “the human mind according to which its default state is one of stability, steadiness, and single-pointed focus.
“Telling myself I’m distracted,” he writes, “is a way of yanking on the leash and struggling to get back to equilibrium.”
But this isn’t how the human mind actually works. “The natural state of the mind is often for it to bounce gently around, usually remaining only loosely focused and receptive to new stimuli, the state sometimes known as ‘open awareness,’ which neuroscientific research has shown is associated with incubating creativity.”
This state of mind also makes sense from an evolutionary perspective.
“The prehistoric human who could choose to fix her attention firmly on one thing, and leave it there for hours on end, so that nothing could disturb her,” Oliver interjects, “would soon have been devoured by a saber-toothed tiger.”
Spending our time looking for ways to eliminate interruptions and distractions might seem like a smart way to stay focused on what’s happening.
“Yet in fact it pulls us out of it, by undermining our capacity to respond to reality as it actually unfolds – to seize unexpected opportunities and to be seized by an awe-inspiring landscape or fascinating conversation; to let our mind take an unplanned journey into fertile creative territory, or to find enjoyment, as opposed to annoyance, in a small child bursting into our study, while fulfilling our obligations as a parent.
“Getting lost and distracted in this way is what life is for,” Zen teacher John tells us.
3: Getting better at getting better is what RiseWithDrew is all about.
Monday through Thursday, we explore ideas from authors, thought leaders, and exemplary organizations.
At the end of each week, we are exploring some of the life lessons Oliver shares in his wonderful book Meditations for Mortals.
Does this mean we shouldn’t have boundaries? Or attempt to work somewhere quiet? Or, as Oliver puts it, welcome “every instance of pestering by every oblivious or entitled jerk in our lives”?
No.
“It might just mean approaching the phenomena we pejoratively label ‘interruptions’ and ‘distractions’ a little more neutrally,” Oliver suggests.
When an interruption does happen, author Paul Loomans recommends we give it our full attention.
“Once our focus has already been diverted,” he writes, “once the child has burst into the room, or the anxious thought about the timing of our doctor’s appointment has pulled us away from the novel we were reading – don’t fight the fact.
“Deal with our new reality instead. Make a note to check the time of the appointment; or look the child in the eyes, listen to their request – then either close our laptop to be with them, or explain we’ll need to finish what we’re doing first.”
“And speaking of children bursting into rooms,” Oliver shares, “at the time of writing, almost 60 million people have watched the moment during the coronavirus pandemic when the two small children of Robert Kelly, an expert on Korean politics based in Busan in South Korea, entered the study where he was giving a live interview to the BBC and capered wildly for several seconds, before his wife acrobatically managed to extract them.
“Is anyone seriously going to claim this interruption turned out to be a bad thing?” he asks. “Obviously not: It made a strange moment in history microscopically more joyful, and kindled empathy worldwide from locked-down parents struggling to juggle work and family.
“‘We thought no TV network would ever call us again,’ Robert recalled later, but the opposite proved the case; it was professionally beneficial, too.”
The truth is, we don’t know. “We try so hard to cling to the rock face of fixed focus; we fall off, again and again,” Oliver notes, “yet when we do, as John Tarrant beautifully puts it, ‘the world catches us every time.’
“We lose grip on our plans for the day, and find ourselves tumbling into life.”
More next week!
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Reflection: Am I seeing life’s interruptions as problems to avoid, or opportunities to reconnect, create, and experience the richness of the present?
Action: The next time an interruption happens, pause and welcome it with curiosity—give the moment my full attention before returning to my plans.
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