Do you get the feeling like our attention is being pulled in countless directions? It’s as if we’re not ever supposed to focus on anything. I’m not likely to give up my distractions anytime soon but I am going to try and give myself some shutdown time that isn’t just sleep. I’d ask you how you’re doing with that. I mean, do you feel like you are doing anything you love, or that what you love is getting enough of your attention? Or are you feeling like there isn’t any time? Is there just too much going on these days? I’d tell you that I’ve seen this said in perhaps different phrasing for generations now. The popularity of newspapers, radio, telephone, television, etc. Even books were considered something that might ruin us! Taking us out of nature and making us less present in our lives. So, basically, anything can be a distraction, I suppose.
distractions
a journal entry
Monday, August 11th, 2014.
5:15pm I want to write poetry but I don’t believe in myself.
10:10pm That is not a good enough excuse anymore.
I went for years not finishing anything. Because, of course, when you finish something you can be judged.
- Erica Jong
“At the Public Library at Forty-second Street I saw the room of manuscripts. It looked like a jail cell. It was locked, and not only locked but it had a heavy iron-grille door like that of a prison. It was more terrible to me, this burying of manuscripts, than the burial of a body in the earth. Perhaps because I have been tormented by the ethical conflict of the diary. Should I destroy it for the sake of human beings it might wound, or keep it because it has value for human beings. I received my life from books. So I would be killing a life-giving creation, to save a few from the truth. But who saved me from the truth? No one ever spared me that. The world needs the truth. No matter how painful. Because when people bury the truth it festers. The grilled, locked room of the Public Library is also the tomb in which we lock the dangerous truths.
I cannot imagine my diaries there. Read in gloom and darkness, not in the sun and by the sea.”
- Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anais Nin Volume Five 1947-1955