Focus, damn it!
That's been the broken record in my head for weeks now. It's been hot and that's no small impact on my physiology. I have some kind of sweat trigger threshold and once it's been breached it's full on soak through the shirt until the temperature is reduced by at least 10 degrees and my body has remained motionless for at least 30 minutes. Without something life-threatening motivating me, there is no concentrating in that state. Just mouth-open, vacant stare Food Network re-runs with a wet towel around my neck.
I've also taken solace in the apparent camaraderie of my scattered, surface-dwelling peers. I've managed to read through 2 or 3 articles in the past month all based on research indicating that the way we now use the Internet is re-wiring our brains and that attention is at a premium. I've paid some attention to what I do at the computer and it would seem that I am a mild version of their attention-deprived subjects. There's a lot of skimming and cursory input and not a lot of digestion and output. Real-time feeds create a sort of addiction that people might remember earlier on with email and then with Blackberry messages and texts. Regardless of the personal importance or impact the brain is set to retrieve more updates simply because there will be more updates. Even though I enjoy scrolling through posts on Tumblr and RSS feeds and keeping track of the people I follow on Twitter I have to admit that I wouldn't be any worse off if I didn't get these updates, let alone in real-time. I'm going to exert a little control over how I receive input because, obviously, there's a natural limit that my brain is willing or able to process and by the time I get home that limit's usually been reached. Since the heat has broken for approximately one day and I am already able to put this down in words I'm distancing myself somewhat from the most devastatingly affected. I'm not one of them yet, but the clock is ticking too loudly to ignore how close I am to slipping.
Somehow I associate focus with stress and I'd rather not be stressed. So, I have a tendency to focus in short bursts and then retreat for relief in mindlessness. I'm not sure where I picked this up but it has definitely been there lurking for a long time. There's something about focusing on a task or an issue and then hitting a block that you don't know how to overcome that transitions pretty naturally to avoidance. Since I don't expect to have all the answers anytime soon I suppose I had better get used to the discomfort of sporadic gaps in ability or judgment.
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