DISTRACTION

The inceptual posting on this blog, written sometime in 2002 but relevant.
Why this posting?
I don't know. But it works.

Distraction

I am forty three years old and more observant than I’ve ever been. Thing is, I’m observing myself more than ever and strangely enough, I’m beginning to grow a firmer friendship with the person I’ve found.
Something else occurred to me a while ago but has become even more pronounced the more I observe it. It’s the phenomenon of distraction, a neo-syndrome that walks hand-in-glove with rampant materialism.
I sit on an exercise cycle in the gym and look around me, aware that I am here to focus on physical wellbeing and my own body. I am here to help empower myself a little more. It’s not about narcissism or large muscles – I think I’ve outgrown much of that. Not to say I don’t have an ego and want to look good – I do but it’s much more to do with the way it makes me feel rather than what I want to present to the world for external validation.
The more I thought about this, the more I realised that the world we’ve created is just loaded with external distractions even when we’ve supposedly made decisions to focus purely on ourselves - become quietly introspective and perhaps ask telling questions of ourselves.
The point of my exercise regime is to focus on what my body feels like when I’m performing the work and at what level it’s performing and if it’s performing more easily than it did last time. To do this I need to set up the bike the same way I’ve done before and gauge myself over the same time. I need to be looking at the machine in concert with my mind and body. And this is what I do.
Then I glance up at my surroundings.
There are four other people on cycles around me – two women, two men. Both women have their towels draped over the control console of the machines and are pedalling as if this was laundry time – a necessary chore. They don’t want to be here for this. One of them is reading a book – a text book. Studying perhaps while her legs spin with little or no effort until…? Until the buzzer goes and she moves on to the next chore, the next dumb machine. They don’t want to see how they’re performing at all – they certainly don’t want the machines to communicate with them in any way.
I think: why bother? If they believed it would do any good, they’d send their maids to do this for them and pay them a bonus for the burnt calories. Cynical, I think, but that’s how it seems.
The men are different. They are working at a more strenuous pace and only one has the console hidden. But they are both watching TV – the sports channel. Another distraction. The cricket’s on.
I think to myself: You are distracted too – you’re doing a survey. But at the same time, I’m changing resistance levels, checking my cadence, standing in the saddle to do the hill climb and regularly sipping water when I take to the saddle again. I am aware of my performance. Are they? Do they want to be? If not, why not? It’s their choice, I guess. Am I competing with them? I consider this and decide – no I don’t think so.
Is it any wonder, I think, that we have bred a generation of attention deficits? We want our children to perform in society and succeed (whatever that means) and to be focused on their goals yet we surround them with distractions. We have taught them how not to be focused. We spend our own leisure time distancing ourselves from who we are. We watch movies, drive cars, eat to quell persistent hunger, smoke, drink alcohol, buy bigger houses and nicer cars, compete with our friends and peers and hope like hell our rugby team will win the Super 12 (now 14) or the Currie Cup. Oh sure, we read as well. But what do we read? Something that will remove us from this reality for a while or something that arrests us enough to look at ourselves.
Distractions.
And what have we created with these distractions?
A world and an identity that is validated by everyone and everything but ourselves. We look in the mirror and we wish we were different but we don’t bother to continue the dialogue.
What is it that I want to change about myself?
How do I go about it?
What are my strong points?
Where can I improve at a real manageable level?
No, we generally walk away from the mirror just a little more frustrated. We can take it out on Bush and Blair – the Blair-Bush Project in Iraq. We can find fault with other people – there are plenty more people out there against whom we can measure ourselves. That’s got to be easier than actually doing something about our own shortcomings. And that’s what we do.
And when we see it in our children we are appalled - even surprised. We don’t ask them to just be the people they truly are, we ask them to be better than the others around them because that’s how you succeed. By being distracted from yourself. Instead of being yourself.
Even our humour is so often at the butt of someone else – we laugh at another’s misfortune. It shifts focus from ourselves. That’s fine if we can still laugh at ourselves though. But can we?
We want to be noticed but we don’t want anyone to look. We only want the world to see the shiny, polished, presented bits of ourselves. Is that normal? Why is everyone so afraid of the warty bits when it seems to be the most common thread that all of humanity shares?
I don’t know.
And as I reach the allotted time set for this particular session, I realise that I’ve achieved something more easily than I did last time.
I know my diet has had a lot to do with it. I know that getting a bit more sleep has also helped. But I was aware of an improvement in this performance before I even looked at the machine’s console for confirmation. It is an inner knowing. And it’s more than enough to inspire me to continue to ask questions of myself.
It’s not about bigger, better, faster, more – it’s about knowing who I am – that’s all.
Who are you?