When things become routine they become dull and lacking of attention. Our lives are full of routines from washing up to cleaning our teeth, showering to making a cup of tea. Now, I could say coffee and news are part of my morning ritual, but what I really mean is routine. I do them habitually. In fact often I’ve done them and hardly paid attention that I’ve done them. I am literally half asleep.
A ritual is a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, objects and actions performed in a set sequence, but done with an intention and quality. Ritual is more expressive of certain values and often a shared experience.
In a recent Tricycle podcast Anne Klein spoke about ritual in Buddhist practice as embodying wonder-filled enquiry.
We can build this sense of wonder and curiosity into our daily activities. When we bring attention, energy and focus we imbue our activities with a sense of ritual. We transform the mundane to the magical and the routine can become ritual. This curiosity involves us engaging our imaginations, our senses and opening up to a sense of discovery. Rituals can help us bring not only a sense of wonder but gratitude for every day life. And wonder engages our emotional capacity; ritual engages our head and heart.
Tea Ceremony Gathering in the Meiji Period Mizuno Tashikata
I’ve taken part in a tea ceremony on Buddhist retreat (not in Japan). And to this day it is one of my most memorable experiences of pure attention. And I have never tasted tea quite like it. The tea ceremony involves preparing, serving, and drinking tea in a ritualistic and ceremonial way where it is used to promote wellbeing, mindfulness, and harmony. If you can’t get to experience this first hand. This book might be the next best thing.
Where’s your head at?
I think one of the reasons why our life feels routine and dulled is the impoverishment of our attention. I promised in my last post to say a little more about Johann Hari’s new book Stolen Focus.
In his book he explores how research has shown the average adult stays focused on a task for only three minutes, for young people that goes down to sixty five seconds. We are accelerating and being fed information beyond what our brain can manage and our resources for attention are exhausted. We are reading less (so thank you for reading this), even talking faster and walking faster. The original Blackberry slogan was ‘anything worth doing is worth doing faster’ and Googles unofficial moot is ‘if it’s not fast, you’re fucked’.
When our minds and bodies are asked to move this fast our ability to focus drops, we make more mistakes, creativity is stifled and we feel frazzled. Add to this potent mix is the fact that 40% of us are sleep deprived, which for children leads to hyperactivity and inability to pay attention.
But it is not only our attention that is corrupted, but also our flow states or ability to be absorbed in a joyful state where we lose sense of time.
Do we want fragmentation or flow?
Mind wandering, reflection and day dreaming is an important part of our mind’s creativity. And yet now, in our empty moments, we often fill them with endless scrolling.
It’s not our fault. Technology has been developed to track and manipulate you, to keep you scrolling, to feed you advertisements, to keep your attention.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way. Technology could be geared to connection, creativity, compassion. We could have different business models based less on engaging our attention for advertisers, and more on a subscriber model putting people rather than businesses at the heart of social media. Radical, but possible argues Hari. Individual changes are good, but systemic changes are necessary.
And until these happen I have withdrawn from all social media. And I can tell you, it’s liberating. I read far more. I have time for idle reflection when all kinds of creative thoughts and ideas emerge. I enjoy life more. My screen time is down by 70% and I don’t miss social media. I look at my family all around me with incredulity, all glued to their screens an inordinate amount of time and I feel like someone from a different planet who really sees people being sucked into their screens.
James Williams (former Google strategist) who has spent years studying focus says there are three different forms of attention.
Spotlight - focus on immediate actions
Starlight - focus on longer term goals (because when you feel lost you look up to the stars to get your direction)
Daylight - the ability to reflect and think clearly
Williams believes losing our daylight is the deepest form of distraction. We become obsessed with petty goals, depend on simplistic signals from the outside world and are lost in a cascade of distractions. Williams suggests our attention crisis deprives us of all three forms of attention and that we are ‘losing our light’.
Hari’s book also looks at wider conditions such as work exhaustion, curtailment of childhood freedom and play, and causes of ADHD. And he comes up with three radical solutions:
Ban of surveillance capitalism because people who are being hacked can’t focus.
Introduce a four day week, because people who are chronically exhausted can’t pay attention.
Rebuild childhood around letting kids play freely.
I would add some smaller suggestions:
Slow down
Build ritual into your day
Take time to reflect and day dream
Read more and retrain your brain to read lengthy articles
Take social media off your devices for a month and see if you really miss it and see how much more time you have to do the above.
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I would suggest going off social media for at MINIMUM 6 months to notice the difference. After a year, I went back on and my ability to focus was so great that I actually amd overwhelmed and cannot process something like FB - my bad habit seems to be broken permanently. I get no dopamine rushes now.
An addendum just to add this little quote from Theodore Rothko: ‘A mind too active is no mind at all’