Tell yourself no email, no social networking, indeed no digital stimulation whatsoever (except perhaps for some music) for several hours while you concentrate on your work, and notice how your mind relaxes. The daily dog-paddle we do against the current of the digital sea is exhausting–and not nearly as stimulating as our habitually fractured consciousness wishes it to be.
In an article this week in the New York Times, “The Art of Focus,” David Brooks talks about an interview with child psychologist Adam Phillips that appeared in The Paris Review. From Phillips’s work with children Brooks gleans a principle to help combat digital distraction more effectively:
“The lesson from childhood, then, is that if you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say “no” to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say “yes” to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.”
The point is not not to say “no” to the trivial distractions. Regular digital fasts are necessary for the good of the soul. But in order to make that “no” easier to say we need to focus even more on the “yes” of the passion that brings us to our writing in the first place. That can be done in myriad ways. By re-reading something from a favorite author, or undertaking a long free-writing exercise to get back into the groove of composition. For me, a sustained period utterly focused on writing is enough to remind me of that writing is play and more interesting than anything on Facebook or a Twitter stream.
Brooks quotes Phillips as saying something else very interesting, that in order to pursue their intellectual adventures, children need a secure social base. Observes Phillips:
“There’s something deeply important about the early experience of being in the presence of somebody without being impinged upon by their demands, and without them needing you to make a demand on them. And that this creates a space internally into which one can be absorbed. In order to be absorbed one has to feel sufficiently safe, as though there is some shield, or somebody guarding you against dangers such that you can ‘forget yourself’ and absorb yourself, in a book, say.”
The loving parent is the best guardian of the absorbing play of the child. There is a spiritual analogue here, I believe, for the writer.
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