Where are you on this nexus?
(Test Question courtesy of Mimi. My profile in comments below.)
Source: gaping void
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Tag: Focus
Word of the Day: F-O-C-U-S…
Absolutely unmixed attention is…
“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.”
~ Simone Weil
"[The French philosopher Simone Weil said, ‘Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.’] I love that. I think that could be as close as someone can get to a wonderful definition of prayer. In that sense, prayer has nothing spiritual or religious about it. A mathematician working at a problem or a little kid trying to pick out scales on the piano is a person at prayer. She’s not saying prayer is absolute unmixed attention; it’s the other way. The attention itself is the quality that she wants to call prayer. So whatever context you’re putting it in, whether it’s inside a church or inside a toy box, that’s the quality that is the sacred one."
—Translator Stephen Mitchell via Krista’s Journal: Approaching Prayer.
Sources:
- Post: Thank you via Crashingly Beautiful via It’s Like This.
- Image by artist Vladimir Queiroz Sejas. Thank you Anake Goodall.
My DNF list is soaring…
Prior to my iPad acquisition, I was a minimum one-book-a-week reader. Now that’s slumped to maybe 2 per month and the trendline “ain’t pretty.” And I am the type that MUST finish my book…no matter what. (There must be a personality disorder for needing to finish a horrible book…no matter what.) I now have a growing collection of DNFs (Did-Not-Finish) and a knot in my stomach. DNFs are also so much easier to hide and forget on your eReader. This New York Times article sums up my malady: Finding Your Book Interrupted … By the Tablet You Read It On. Here’s some choice excerpts:
“Can you concentrate on Flaubert when Facebook is only a swipe away, or give your true devotion to Mr. Darcy while Twitter beckons?”
“E-mail lurks tantalizingly within reach. Looking up a tricky word or unknown fact in the book is easily accomplished through a quick Google search. And if a book starts to drag, giving up on it to stream a movie over Netflix or scroll through your Twitter feed is only a few taps away.”
“Some of the millions of consumers who have bought tablets and sampled e-books on apps have come away with a conclusion: It’s harder than ever to sit down and focus on reading…These apps beg you to review them all the time…” Continue reading “My DNF list is soaring…”
Sometimes things get done better when you’re doing something else…
I’m a chronic multitasker. And with my IPad…forgettaboutit…I’m like a grasshopper flicking from blade of grass to blade of grass…from my growing list of half finished books on my Kindle app to “Words-with-Friends” to Yahoo Mail to my Blog and back through the doom loop again. Horrible gadget that I can’t seem to dislodge from my hand. (Please…please tell me that I’m not alone here).
And then you have wave after wave of productivity gurus who pour it on stating that we are less productive when we multitask– this all has my guilt-o-meter raging. Yet, I can feel the drip, drip, drip of the recent research turning in my favor. This reminds me of the margarine-being-better-than-butter theories which were later turned upside down. Or, reminds me of the famous quote: “What is, let it be.” (Source: I just made this up. How profound one can be when rationalizing.)
Yes, I can hear all of you armchair psychologists out there chirping that the man is simply feeding his “confirmation bias.” That is, I’m selectively hearing what I want to hear in order to support my multitasking habit. That’s me. Yes, I’m gobbling up the recent research on distraction-is-good for me. And you know what, I LIKE IT. And if you caught the paradox between this rant and the caption title in Helen Dardik’s illustration above, an extra 100 points for you. There is a part of me that may be a wee bit wrong here. Nonetheless, onward. Confirmation basis and all – we push on.
Here’s a few tasty morsels from the NY Times (the fountain of all knowledge) article titled: The Art of Distraction – A Flighty Mind Might Be Going Somewhere. Is Our Focus on Focus misguided? It is authored by Hanif Kureishi, a playwright, filmaker, novelist and short-story writer. And naturally, I’m sharing only the excerpts from this article that support my personality disorder.
Continue reading “Sometimes things get done better when you’re doing something else…”