Now retired from teaching, floating lazily through my mature (I love euphemisms) years, I find my friends have, somehow, inexplicably, also grown older. Our discussions over breakfast, lunch or 4 o’clock dinners fascinate because our experiences mirror one another. In addition, our elderly “transitions” are not dangerous, but rather endearing, lovable.
Our loved ones, however, find our flaws frustrating, especially when we arrive late, forget to pick up the one thing they ask us to buy (tobasco sauce) or request five minutes on a tech problem that takes three hours.
A common problem can be illustrated thus: I’m going from kitchen to bedroom to grab something. Upon arrival, I look around the room as if I have wandered into the bedroom at the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It’s not until I return to the kitchen, spot the full pot of coffee, do I remember the coffee mug on my desk.
Hang on a second. Gotta check my Facebook posts.
OK, I’m back. Never enough “Likes,” but you learn to live with the ones you get, especially if there’s a heart or crying-happy face.
Now, what was I talking about? Oh, right, becoming distracted by a text DINNNGGGG, a phone’s RINNNNGGGG or a spouse’s question from one floor and three rooms away.
So how can we focus better?
One idea arrived in a book assigned to a new group of poets corralled at the Batavia library. To silence a multitude of voices and screens, Kim Addonizio in “Ordinary Genius” suggests, “Sit still for a moment. It doesn’t need to be a long moment; a few deep breaths, enough to clear your head and center yourself.”
Poet Billy Collins expounds on this in “I Ask You”: “What scene would I want / to be enveloped in / more than this one, / an ordinary night at the kitchen table, / floral wallpaper pressing in, / white cabinets full of glass / the telephone silent, / a pen tilted back in my hand.”
Sorry, be right back. It’s been five minutes since I checked my email.
OK, got my 48th dopamine hit of the day.
Where was I? Oh, right. How to maintain attention despite distractions.
In “Aflame,” Pico Iyer’s memoir of his visitation to a Benedictine monastery above California’s Big Sur, he learns about and practices quietude. Once, when leaving the mountain, he tells a friend about his new home, including, “The fact there’s no need of texts or theories. It’s just silence and emptiness and light. No screens at all.”
“No screens,” his friend repeats, understanding Iyer means “more than TV sets.”
In a TED talk, Iyer elaborates, “Going nowhere was at least as exciting as going to Tibet or to Cuba. ... I mean nothing more intimidating than … sit still long enough to find out what moves you most, to recall where your truest happiness lies.”
In Mark Haber’s novel “Lesser Ruins,” a community college teacher is bent on writing about his hero, Michel de Montaigne, but is plagued by interruptions.
“I yearned for the time to … do the slow thinking banished from our contemporary world,” he muses, “impervious to … half-baked howls and shrieks, rants and inanities, in short, our world’s incoherence.”
Henry David Thoreau is famous for dodging distractions, taking off for the woods, not to play hermit, but “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life” (“Walden”). We don’t need a forest; we need only to “not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.”
Oops, there’s the doorbell. Must be Amazon. Be right back.
• Rick Holinger earned a Ph.D. in creative writing from UIC. His work has been accepted for publication in Chicago Quarterly Review, Chautauqua and elsewhere. His poetry book, “North of Crivitz,” and essay collection, “Kangaroo Rabbits and Galvanized Fences,” are available at local bookstores, Amazon or richardholinger.net. Contact him at editorial@kcchronicle.com.