There is no bulletproof system for focusing. Distractions are everywhere. Your phone, the news (especially today with COVID-19), even the things we should be doing pull us from the task at hand, leave us forgetful when we enter a room and don’t remember why we were there, what we were wanting to do. All these things that swirl in our mind take us out of this mindset we call “focus.”
In this day and age where these material things vie for our attention and twist our mental pathways into a snake eating its own tail, it takes a large amount of work to become mentally resilient to these distractions. It takes a dig.
Imagine how each of us has a mind to tame, to work on, to carve out. There isn’t a manual we are given denoting how to handle the neurological mystery of our thoughts, but there are plenty of self-help books, religious texts, motivational speakers out there trying to provide a way to go about building our mental focus. This work we all do is sadly too much to meet the immediate concentrative need of our obligations.
Imagine the pressure we feel as we daydream at work when our manager comes by and says: “Get to work or quit wasting time.” We actually tell ourselves these commands because our mind can’t lock into what’s in front of us, to the moment. But why? What mystery behind our mind’s eye keeps us reactionary to our thoughts and inactive to our work?
There is much to what I have found in this shared quest of living life fully. What I have worked to map is something I call “intentionality” – a simplification of what is at the core of our identity and our actions, the who and the what. The compass we use to choose, or choose not to choose. The mathematical derivative of our thoughts, the rate by which our neurons morph and change. The lense behind our eyes that lets us see, if we choose to.
What I talk about directly is what “focus” is the product of. Identifying how certain traits/properties are a product of something is an actual technique I use to decode and maneuver through my distractions. But to the point, focus comes from something, a spring of mental energy, pure and forthcoming.
I’d like to go into more on all these tangents I run into as I write this, but let me “re-focus” on the point (I know, how ironic :P). It takes a dig.
I have refined my dig into the following four principles: I figure out what I have; I look for how to make the most of it; I notice what I missed, what was wrong in my process; and, I never settle for the results/thoughts/answers I find. I call it “phoenixing” because, in some sense, these principles are as difficult to process as trying to ignite burnt ash. It is doable, but it takes a heck of a lot of energy and most certainly does not produce the combustion effect most people desire.
As a short example of what I mean, in my sophomore year of college, I had a grind week that involved multiple lab assignments in Mechatronics, midterms in Material Science and Dynamics, and a long problem set in DiffEQ (differential equations). It was in a study room at 4 am just after I finished the 20 hour DiffEQ problem set, when I ran into an engineering buddy of mine.
He asked me, “Have you studied for the MatSci midterm?”
I replied with “You mean the one on 3 days?”
He said directly, “No… it’s in 4 hours.”
Out of my exhaustive stupor, something broke inside me. It was like hearing a car colliding, glass shearing, chalk scraping, like that Spongebob episode when Spongebob deleted his name from memory. My bandwidth had hit its limits to a point where I subconsciously thought the midterm was happening at the end of the week. And, my mind had to hit a hard reset to handle the weight of a really hard, completely unprepared midterm now in my sights. The worst part was the midterm was in a course I absolutely loved… And I had 4 hours to scrap together an already day-spent brain and the unsettled feeling of a mind betrayed by itself. The stress attack that followed gutted me, but activating the parts, grappling my intentionality into full force, helped keep me from hyperventilating. The first principle: what did I have? It most certainly wasn’t time. Four hours to press through ten chapters of material. I think not. It wasn’t my smarts. No cleverness could help me get through what was coming. I had friends, but their support would lean more towards unethical options for what my situation required. I was on my own. My choices left me in this hole.
The dig was coming up empty which made me begin to hyperventilate. My friend had no idea what was going on… As I started losing control of my breath, my intentionality, I realized that to lose something meant I had something. What I had was my breath. And I was about to lose it.
Hook, line, and sinker, so principle two: how do I make the most of it? Well, gulp that air down!!!! But instead of giving me control, my hyperventilating escalated. Deep down, subconsciously, more air meant breathe in quickly…
So, third principle: I missed something. Making the most of the air we breathe means holding onto it, letting your lungs pass the air all the way to your toes, feeling each beat of your heart mix with what you’ve locked into your lungs and diffuse it throughout every blood vessel.
But now, the fourth: never settle for what you have. When we breathe, some of the air is caught in the stomach. As a trumpet player, the diaphragm helps push that extra store of air into a powerful sound, but to use it fully, I had to tense my core to put all the weight in my lungs. The burning feeling was invigorating!
But, again, never settle. This new mode of breathing took 8 full seconds before I would cycle into the next breath. And, I only had three and a half hours left before what was inevitable would occur. 8 seconds in three and a half hours meant I could keep this up 1,575 times before my pencil would sign my name on that first page of fate. I had 1,575 moments left to map what I could of the coursework, the techniques I would encounter and need to deal out. The size of that number in my head gave me something I could work with, and whatever aftermath I would face, the grade, the exhaustion, it didn’t matter. I had my breath, a breath that wouldn’t settle.
I looked my friend in the eyes with a smile, he calmed a bit with a bewildered look stuck on his face, and I unpacked my study material. It was time to unsettle myself once more.
Locking my intentionality into the next breath cycle, I took the burning sensation and blitzed through my mind, isolating lectures, words, problem sets, labs that all dealt with material science. The flood of images and major points that danced around needed structure, a hierarchy, to sort into a coherent set of selective data points. What topics I couldn’t pin down I searched for in my paper notes. What needed refreshing I pulled from the textbook. What needed instinct, I snatched from my problem sets, reworking the items and the process I missed through my problem solving approach. Each breath was a push. Anytime the exhaustion returned, I learned to pull the air back, teeter tottering back and forth like a tree, deeply rooted yet ever reaching.
It was as if I was the Wind and had a Name. Sitting down for that midterm as ready as I’d ever be, I realized the number of breaths I had after this grind, was countless. The daunting-ness of those coming moments birthed fear, but the sublime of each flavor caught in the current of this wind emanated resonating forms of … harmony.
Not gonna lie, this is a full pessimistic, critical, unforgiving dive into the items that steal my intentionality. I will say, doing this process enough, you do stumble onto something that has to not be wrong and something that you can’t settle for. But that is for a later time, the time after the Dig.
The Dig is a tempering that I have leaned on much in this intrepid journey, a tempering which made every weave and turn the brushstrokes of my life.
I offer you this intro, a small thing on how remarkable life is when we “focus,” what unsurmountable power we summon when we choose truly to act, and how vast the action, the options of action, is and breathes. More to come, always.
Signed,
Hammer-skjöld
Sam Lester is currently a senior in the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University studying Mechanical Engineering and Material Science. Being passionate in the rigor and discipline of the sciences, Sam feels most in tune with himself when he is sharing what he’s learned and finds avenues to do just that. As a teaching assistant for his close professors or working at Duke’s virtual reality lab, he introduces complex concepts and digital worlds to anyone curious. Sam will be pursuing a Ph.D. in Bioengineering at the University of Oregon in Dr. Guldberg’s lab of regenerative medicine.
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