I learn something new every day. Actually, maybe I learn too much every day and a lot of it is unnecessary. Isn’t that the etiology of TMI (Too Much Information)?
Today, as I was propped up on my writerly pillows, breeze coming gently through the windows, with my computer on my lap, I thought about a phrase I found yesterday from Basho. But that is another story, a blog I will write today. Maybe.
While preparing to face the blank page of this WordPress screen, I noticed a few boxes I had never scrolled over before. Why not? Because I write when I am here, I do not wander around much inside my website’s design. Why? It makes me bonkers to realize how much there is to know.
But today? Today, while seeking peace and preparing to write about Basho and what Basho said, or hopefully said, I found this little box with four arrows pointing at each corner of the box — Distraction Free Mode. It is rather like the one below I took ten minutes of distracted time to paint with my Zen Brush app on my iPad, which is not where I am writing at the moment.
The idea of Distraction Free Mode got me to thinking of what it was like when our brains were developing back when we first stood upright, and what our brains looked like during the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, during the colonization of the Americas, before the light bulb, the car and the computer. We were pretty distraction-free, yes?
Freud said that modern man (and he was talking Victorian man) suffered from neurosis because it had replaced genuine suffering that we knew in earlier times. If that is what he saw then, what can we say about Electronically Generated Attention-Deficit Disorder, about children who text in class, who are on to the next thing before this thing has had a moment to breathe?
The folks at WordPress may have the right idea. For months, I had a sign up over my writing desk: Exercise Your Parental Controls. This meant that the adult within me had to parent the kid inside me so that I could get a little work done in a reasonable fashion.
And all of this got a little easier and more focused when I found my first Jizo. When I was able to sit and meditate for five, ten, 15, up to 30 minutes. Naturally. With ease. How? Willingness. An egg-timer. Focusing on my Jizo statue. Allowing my mind to wander and practicing the loving of my mind, as it performed it’s familiar circus-like act of chatter and noise.
While I am not prepared to click Alt + Shift + W — the shortcut for Distraction Free Mode — while writing yet, I sure like the sound of it and the art that grew out of the moment. Peace.
Distraction Free Writing Mode Box
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