In times like these, I have come to appreciate how irretrievably twinned the stages of creative energy and expansive time are. Ironically, many of us are all too aware of how time can be snatched away or stolen, and that often comes with the consequence of feeling emptied – in mind, body, and creative spirit. It even seems a tad bizarre when you imagine time being spoken of as a resource that could ideally be owned and possessed. Time like money, is an emotionally loaded subject.
In watered-down contemporary mindfulness parlance, it might be metaphorically referred to as “taming the monkey mind.” It often surprises me how much time and effort is peeled into ruminating about time management, as opposed to how you redirect your attention, trim away those excesses of thought. And folds and folds of time, to arise, to daydream, detour, to entertain and to craft tangential ideas that are brought back to drawing board, before they become the very seeds that are laid out to germinate in the sun. Or better still that Shambhala of single-pointed focus, the splinters of banished acts of multi-tasking at your feet. The steady concentration in a closed or open space encrusted in silence, sans white noise. In my mind´s eye, it conjures the following: plenty of focused light streaming in from a glass pane the steady glow of a table spotlight on a wintry evening. Over the last decade, much has been writing in praise of deep work, to invoke Jay Papasan, Cal Newport, and Greg McKeown with their own diverse takes. This declaration felt like a soothing balm to the slow-burn of scatteredness and depletion. Arguably, at its worst, ours is a world of the personality cult, in accumulating a litany of accolades, publications, grant funds, students, ideas. In a world, academic or otherwise, patterned by the desire to amass, as opposed to expand. Rapti Siriwardane – A book review for Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallagher (2010), March 30, 2020ĭespite everything, we all exist in cones of privilege, in our own insular ways.
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