It’s so normal to live our lives within a restricted box of what we believe is possible and normal, and everything else is kind of outside the box.
Now, most of us, we don’t really want to think of ourselves as living in a box.
You know, it’s feels nicer to believe that we are facing the wide world and we’re not hiding from anything.
We’re open and really in touch with the world, and not hiding away in a box.
That doesn’t sound good.
And yet, it seems like to some degree we all do this, because the world is simply too much.
It’s just too much to face everything all at once, and it’s just part of the nature of life that we create this sort of bubble, that we live within the bubble, and that’s how we get by.
So it seems like this is something that is so normal that we don’t even think about it, that we are going through every day not looking at, not dealing with, not facing, almost everything that’s going on.
And I’m talking about normal here.
This is not even just like escapism, where it goes even further towards trying not to face anything.
This is just normal, even normal, healthy, good life.
We are always looking at a limited set of what’s possible.
And it seems like maybe this is the only way that we can get by, because there’s just too much going on, and we have to limit our attention and limit our range of vision to only certain things.
Now, then that leads to the question of what should we focus on? And so maybe escapism is really about focusing on the wrong things.
And no matter what we look at, there’s going to be a certain narrowness of vision that we have to accept.
We cannot face the entire universe all at once.
No matter what, we’re always going to be selective in what we’re seeing, what we’re paying attention to.
So it’s up to us to select the most useful, valuable, meaningful things to put our attention on.
It really seems like our attention is possibly the most important thing that we can control, because it’s like this decides what’s going to be in our bubble of experience.
We let certain things into the bubble by paying attention to them, and the things that we choose to not pay attention to, they are pushed out of the bubble.
Yeah, I have a hard time saying this, because I don’t like to imagine that I am living in a bubble.
I like to imagine that I’m really, you know, plugged into the world and open to the universe and, you know, in principle, at least, trying to be as open as possible.
And yet, attention is always going to be a limited thing.
Except on the mystical, spiritual level of apprehending the whole universe and the oneness, the totality: we can in that sense embrace the whole universe.
But when it comes to actual thoughts and actions, what we’re dealing with, it’s always going to be a selection.
So I find it useful to think about this idea of what am I choosing to pay attention to? What am I choosing to put my energy into, my attention specifically? There are so many things that are competing for my attention, and it just seems to be that’s part of the environment we live in, where there are so many demands on our attention.
And for those people who are not able to make that selection themselves, to say no to paying attention to certain things, and yes to others, then we’ll always be at the mercy of whatever is around us, pushing and pulling us and grabbing our attention.
It’s like we’re blind to anything that we’re not paying attention to in some way, whether directly thinking about it, or maybe it’s integrated as part of an automatic part of our life, a system in our life.
These are the things that we have attention towards.
And everything else, it’s like we’re powerless to do anything about things that we don’t even notice at all.
So I’d be curious to hear: what are the things that you are giving your attention to, or maybe certain things that are taking too much attention that really shouldn’t be?
#chooseyourfocus #payattention #chooseyourattention