Something I've been playing more and more with lately is the ability to loosen your attention, such that it doesn't get stuck on unpleasant sensations, or avoiding things I feel like I should be doing, or my current job which I totally despise, or scenarios that the mind gets stuck in—such as the effects of societal decline within my lifespan. 1
All of those things exist and it would be a terrible idea to deny them, but at the same time, they do not account for the totality of my experience, and moreover, focusing on them rarely improves anything in my life. Having a job you hate is one thing, but ruminating over and over again about how much you hate it doesn't move you in any way whatsoever towards a better life, it's just an indulgence in negative emotions.
As such I find there are two general directions worth moving with regards to those negative emotions: 1) allowing them to come up without filtering or suppressing them, and perhaps even leaning into them even more and 2) allowing your attention to gently rest on more pleasant things, which isn't the same thing as trying to forcefully delude yourself into feeling better.
By default I think most of us hover in the limbo between the two, similar to how hovering between work and genuine rest is the default, because the two responses require a fluidity in attention that isn't really promoted in our society, which benefits from people being mechanical, i.e. unconscious, as much as possible.
The first response is very useful because it actually takes a fair amount of conscious time, not just time, to process that something is going on. That's probably why people in abusive relationships take so long to even realize what's going on, and to a much lesser degree, it's probably why when it's really cold outside, people feel the need to say to themselves that "it's so cold oh my god how can it be so cold". I am not sure I have even accepted that so much of my time is being funneled into something I simply do not care about, and how much I hate this. As such, I'm very much struggling with getting a healthy sense of motivation in my own life.
The value of the second response is straightforward, because there are many things that are not improved by merely focusing on what sucks. Moreover, it is good to remind ourselves that it is basically impossible to be in a situation where absolutely everything is unpleasant: even when the body is tense, there are still parts that are totally relaxed, such as the ear lobes for instance. Or, even when several things suck in your day, there is still the next day, and chances are that some things are still at the very least okay in the current one.
It is worth noting how our mood can very easily swing based on a series of only three to four unpleasant events in a row, which we could handle individually, and would have been fine if they were spread over a longer period of time. Having the bus be late and a disagreement with a coworker and the food be awful and a technical issue on the computer and a quick unpleasant comment by the boss, are all rather small inconveniences individually , but if left unchecked, we can feel that the day is rotten just from the accumulation of those small things. The mind tends to get stuck on a sort of availability of evidence: if a lot of recent events, even if rather trivial, add up to the story "this day sucks", then it will keep finding more and more, and believing its own story more and more.
As such, learning to move out of those sticky stories strikes me as a rather crucial move of attention, one that is actually pretty easy and pleasant to do, but one that requires the ability to slow down in daily life, which allows us to not react to everything like a machine, but instead live with more intention.
Easier said than done of course, but very worthwhile.
1 By saying that the mind imagines those scenarios, I am not implying that they aren’t true at all. What I am saying is that the mind has a way of monopolizing your attention, such that you forget everything else, such as: 1) paying attention to your body (see also somatic hazards) 2) focusing on what you can do 3) paying attention to what is good in your life.
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2024-07-22