Mass Distraction and the Foraging Mind
I’m currently navigating a period of mass distraction.
Frustration meets the twitch in my productivity nerve endings and I find myself at the keyboard, to bash away and possibly even rationalise the activities that push and pull me from one side of the house to the other. One task to the next, every now and then taking a seat in one curvature of the mind, to wonder about gift ideas, the next meal, ticket bookings, upcoming podcast guests, the health of loved ones in pain, plants that need watering, upcoming retreat hosting, the cupboards that need cleaning out, this very post which has remained open in a tab for a week (over a completely different topic to what now presents itself as the theme of the day). This, between the real work, the kind that allows me to pay for the things I sit wondering about. The real work is always with me, it doesn’t keep special hours, which was never a problem before but it seems a time table of sorts might now be of some use.
Finding a groove within the mass distraction is both a gift for creative stimulation and assimilation, and a curse. Some days the distraction offers a multi-coloured coat tail to take hold of, swooshing me into brushstrokes of brilliance. Other days it swats at my confidence over possibilities of accomplishment, completion and advancement - no one thing, big or small, precisely being done. Not one fully formed thought - merely tracings of ideas that could just as easily erase themselves for lack of enduring with configuring and figuring until the imagined form begins to grow enough limbs to present a case for itself back to me.
Sometimes the distractions are circumstantial and the power is out so the perfume work with the scale must be rescheduled. At times this can be helpful because now I have to prove to myself that there are enough hours left in the day for me to tick these tasks off, and the challenge is on. Most of the time, with the freedom of managing one’s own work time table, it’s a deadline many of us need or crave. A deadline and a goal are different and yet also the same. The goal is landing the thing. The deadline decides when ‘thy will be done’. But when there are many small projects to work on, the moment one becomes a bit sticky in the figuring, I can just move on to another, to see if that can be figured out quicker. And so the one end of the circle continues in search of the other. Somehow, it does eventually become a ring. Like this moment here, where I complete this piece and move onto the perfume lab in enough time to complete the planned production, before my evening outing.
Yes there are other projects I set out to complete this morning that are not yet fully stitched. There are big bits of my income generating offerings that are simply typed words on half finished documents, half read books, three quarter drawn mind map diagrams, strategic notes in my phone I will forget I’ve made. And yet, somehow I trust this adhoc creative act of mine. In this period of mass distraction, I am mostly frustrating myself, dithering about, ideas floating around my brainosphere like astral debris, feeling a bit groundless in my work. But there is a process that I trust - one that evolves deep within, powered by the central navigating system (CNS). The one that gets excited when I can sit long enough with a body of work to remember how much I love discovering and researching. This is the system that I trust will bring me back to the seat. If I can sit for more than 15 minutes with the perfume, the writing, the workshop planning, etcetera - I connect with that CNS. And it brings me back. I know that if I really let my heart and soul play amongst the things I love, it is harder to turn away.
Sometimes the distractions are mini forages; things I hear, see, and experience through the places I take myself to, whether it’s a heavily distracting drive to a local cafe or a gaze led astray by the breeze coming in from the window, looking at nothing in particular while thinking about everything but the task at hand - these are fragments of life my being is gathering, whether I think I’ll remember them or not. Always foraging. Whether it’s a tangible shell or pebble collected off the beach, or the seed of a thought gone into hibernation, the forager trusts that when summer comes, the colour of the shell sitting on the shelf will catch her eye to inspire, and in the spring the seed will become the fully formed thing that has been patiently awaiting its reimagining.
And so, this trusty practice in writing has moored me in again. I see now how my mind is a forager and I trust that my heart will let me know when it’s time to bring a forage back home.