Finding Focus

Why choosing what’s important can be so difficult

Photo by Mark Arron Smith on Pexels

Hey there everyone—

When I have a ton on my plate, or when I’m being constantly interrupted by life events or competing responsibilities, I can get paralyzed and avoidant. 

Sometimes, when I’m in this space, my head feels like it’s stuffed with cotton, muffling the thoughts that are trying to reach me. Sometimes I feel a blankness, like I’ve lost my personality altogether and I’m just making my way through the day. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been put on a raft and drifted away from my life’s central line. 

When I’m in this place, I often reach for a technique I learned from Leo Babauta, who writes Zen Habits. He uses a simple process to organize his day. It’s flexible, compassionate, and clear. First, you make a giant list of everything that’s swimming around in your head, trivial or weighty, urgent or important. 

Then, the next day, you grab an index card. You choose one thing that’s really important and you put that at the top of the card. Then you choose three things off your giant list that are more ordinary life tasks. You now have a structure for your day. The compassion is built in, along with a slice of realism: a person truly can only accomplish one important thing, and a few ordinary tasks, in each day.

Leo counsels you to always start with the important thing, so you have the necessary energy to work with any fear or avoidance. The goal is to move into action, with full awareness of the emotions and stories that are trying to distract from the hard thing. Once the important thing is out of the way, you’re free to do the less exciting tasks. 

A genius element of this technique is that it is designed to block the lazy parts of ourselves that would entice us to start the day by tackling the easy and boring tasks and then go get a cup of coffee and let life pull us into its current, putting off for another day the important thing that brings up fear and risk, making us uncomfortable.

So far, so good. But I’ve been thinking: What happens if you don’t know what’s important enough to put at the top of that card? Or, conversely, what happens if your “important” list is so long that you don’t know what to choose? 

What happens if your fear of disappointing others, or of taking yourself seriously, is so intense that your mind won’t let you find what is important, and instead offers up only a catalog of your deficiencies, your selfishness, your lifetime of unfinished projects, waving its flag of failure in your face?

I’m talking about a “before”—or maybe a “between” space, after you’ve written the list and when you’re staring at that blank index card—that Leo doesn’t really go into, because he’s focused on how we can work with our resistance in the present moment. 

Leo’s focus on fear is great, because it’s a core driver of behavior. It’s an expression of our survival mechanisms. It’s rooted in social prohibition; it’s rooted in distorted thinking patterns. For Leo, I think, seeking insight about these subjects is giving energy to the “content” that’s rationalizing the fear. From a Zen perspective, talking about what it is that’s driving the fear is another form of avoidance. Feel the fear, act anyway. That’s it. Breathe through it. Begin again.

I’m attracted to the toughness of Zen. Philosophically, I think he’s accurate to move the intervention to the core state. Fear and rage are such elemental, animal parts of all of us. It’s fair to say that almost everyone struggles with these emotions and is susceptible to the way they push us away from danger. Aversion may be a mental construct, but in the body, it feels like our very life depends upon avoiding the perceived threat.

Nevertheless, I think there’s a missing puzzle piece. This newsletter is about the complex interactions between what we think and feel as embodied selves—our personhood, which is what Leo is addressing—and the larger structures of power and violence that stratify and story the cultures of which we are a part.  We are as influenced by the dominant culture’s representations of whether we matter, of who should have power and recognition, of who deserves standing and status—who is “important” enough to know what we should all find “important”—as we are influenced by our bodies’ reflexive prohibitions and our personal and familial experiences of failure and success. These representations explain and make “inevitable” the current state of inequality; they make its future appear assured rather than open to disruption.

Though we may all feel fear when we are embarking on a project or task that means a lot to us, we come to that present moment from very different contexts. That’s the “before” I’m taking about. Our belief that we have the power and the right to act, either on our own behalf or that of others; our access to the resources, time, and support to make an idea real; our being taught that our individuality was as or more important than the collective—all of these elements provide a context within which we can find focus or instead feel like we’re drowning in someone else’s current. 

I name these elements not to say they fully determine our ability to make choices or act. It’s a complex dance: autonomy and relationality; structural power and oppression; imagination and compliance. There’s power in naming the ways our difficulty finding focus isn’t just about social media, or lack of self confidence, or imaginary fears. Some of that fear is rooted in the violence we’ve seen land on the bodies of people we love, or people who look like us, when they took risks, or even when they were just being themselves, on an ordinary day. 

If we come from a family with a legacy of multigenerational poverty, or if our relatives are holding the intergenerational trauma of enslavement or genocide; if aspects of our identity mark us as outside what is considered normal or professional in the dominant white culture, what we find important will likely be in dissonance with that culture. It may also be embraced by a warm and supportive alternative community. It is not “better” to achieve power from inside the dominant culture, or to have to shapeshift in order to be seen. There is no one version of success, of what “important” looks like. At the same time, the dominant culture is creaking and breaking under its inability to solve the pressing problems of our time. There are deep and complex questions about the ways the dominant culture acts as a gatekeeper, keeping transformative ideas that might challenge the status quo out of circulation. There could be an enormous hunger for what you believe is important, and you might not even know it. Many are searching for new ways of thinking, being, acting and don’t know how to access ideas that are circulating in alternative spaces, because they don’t know how to find and gain entrance to them.

When you’ve never seen someone who looks like you in a position of power and who holds that power with joy and ethics in a way that inspires you to do the same—well, it’s harder to allow yourself to imagine doing that important thing. That’s not lack of self confidence. That’s tempering the self, in advance, because there’s no map, or pathway forward. Yet. So to get ready to choose that important thing, to act, if no one who looks like you, or who is situated like you, has done it before? Well, that's a different level of fear. It requires a different amount of energy to push through and figure out that next step.

It is crucial to account for that extra energy. If it takes twice the force to show up, to do the emotional and practical work to take a first step, that can wear a body down. The dominant white culture, with its focus on individualism and meritocracy, illustrated by stories of bootstrapping grit, can be both inspiring and disheartening. When we read our exhaustion as a consequence of our lack of bravery, of our “personal” fear, well, then it’s very easy to think the only reason we haven’t reached our full potential is because we haven’t done our emotional “work.” This is the danger, culturally, of reading systemic inequality as something that can be challenged if people will only do enough work in therapy. If therapy, as an institution that is itself part of the dominant culture, ignores systemic inequality and focuses solely on the personal and familial, then neither therapist nor client are being given the necessary tools to talk about structural power and to identify and combat internalized oppression.

To ask and answer the question of what is important—what we can use as the focal point of our attention—requires practice. Next time, I’ll give you an Action Snack on how to find focus, and determine your own answer to what is important, from this broader systemic perspective.

For now, stay safe out there this week—

xo

Rebecca