Distraction [random]
When I travel, like most people — and geek-people in particular — I suit up with as many distractions as I can carry. My laptop carries an infinite number of distractions by itself, but I also dragged along a DVD of Paprika that I haven’t watched yet, two books involving supernatural heroines, a crossword, a sudoku, and a nano chock-full of music from LD’s daily recs and an audiobook of Cadillac Beach by Tim Dorsey. Sadly, I also brought some work reading.
About 90 minutes into my flight, as I restlessly began shuffling between books and puzzles, I realized I have become truly terrified of a single moment where I’m not engaged with something, whether its a fun something or a work something. If I ever reach a point in my day where I’m not distracted by focusing on something, I immediately try to figure out what diversion to move to next.
I know I’m having an emotional moment when it triggers a movie scene in my head. I suspect that other Geek Prospective staffers and Geeks in general may emote this way. In this case, it must have been serious because my mind went right to Hurlyburly and the bedroom conversation between Eddie and Darlene about distraction, culminating in Eddie’s statement “You know what’s the most distracting thing? Me. Myself. I am my own biggest distraction.” In some sense, duh, that’s a pretty stupid line. But in another sense, as is the case with a lot of obvious statements like this one, if I approach it from a certain vantage point, it contains a useful insight about how I’ve been running things cognitively for most of my life.
Thinking about it, it’s clear this need to fill the void is not a new development. I’ve been chasing one distraction with another since at least age 11, when I had dozens of GameBoy cartridges that could keep me plugged in continuously for the 12 hour vacation drive from TN to FL. I even had the battery pack that plugged into the GameBoy that could keep it alive without going through $40 worth of AAs.* I still kept plenty of AAs on hand just in case. I remember being really surprised in later years by all the reddish clay in Georgia. Even before the GameBoy, I had the Belgariad and the Mallorean, and then the series of stories surrounding Drizzt Do’Urden. I’m pretty sure I could go back further if I thought about it, but you get the idea.
Now, I have to admit that today’s realization wasn’t a lightening bolt out of the blue. It’s been stewing with me for a while, this feeling of being lost a bit in the shuffle of passtimes, and I had been intrigued by enough by the concept of intentional awareness that I had even read a smattering of modern-day Buddhist thought on the subject, such as Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor. If you are curious, it’s an excellent distillation of Buddhist philosophical principles disentangled from Buddhist religious doctrine and applied to modern Western living. The essential idea can be boiled down to the notion that deep awareness of both pleasant and unpleasant moments, in combination with an attempt to avoid clinging to the good moments or distancing ourselves from the unpleasant ones, allows us to actually, well, exist. Or make the most of existing would be a better way to say it. The nutshell doesn’t do the complexity and value of the concept a lot of justice, but there you go.
So today, with that in the background someplace, I was jolted to the point that I actually put the book down, turned off the nano, and just sat there on the plane for ten or fifteen minutes sipping coffee and trying to be present “in the moment.” It was a hell of a lot harder than the Buddhists make it look, but it was strangely invigorating. And that ten or so minutes felt incredibly long.
* $40 in 1990 dollars represents $66.09 in 2007 dollars, adjusted for inflation.