Dear Diary,
Attention – now there’s an interesting directional substance that at every moment of life someone holds captive. That “someone” can be some trifle, say a passenger on the opposite trolleybus seat who looks or behaves wrong, or not a trifle at all – say a life that didn’t go right. But most often the process happens so that at one moment your attention is captured by a passenger who looks wrong, the next by your life that didn’t go right, and the third – again by that same passenger who looks wrong. In this way attention bounces all day from one hostage state to another, rewarding you with experiences of every possible stress, helplessness and meaninglessness.
Old Mooji has beautifully and vividly described this process – when an external object in the form of thoughts about it shackles your attention, a hole forms in your being, a wound through which your vitality in either a small trickle or an uncontrollable fountain sprays in every possible direction, and at the end of the day you greet it physically and emotionally “exsanguinated”, only to regain strength overnight and the next morning throw yourself headlong into this wonderful process again.
So all the advice I share with you in this column is aimed at one single purpose – to free your attention in one way or another. To free it briefly, for one breath, for one moment – that usually suffices to see that a wrong-looking passenger is absolutely not worth your vitality and energy so readily surrendered in the form of attention and emotions, as a result of which you’ll arrive at evening being less “shattered” and wrung out. Over time you’ll notice that life is not one colorful and unending string of stresses and bad emotions, that gaps appear in it to admire a falling autumn leaf, a setting sun, a funny little dog trotting past. Or simply the realization that at this very moment nobody has taken your attention hostage and it dozes cozily curled up in your own heart, while all the holes through which your vitality poured into every possible direction have suddenly and firmly closed up.
The problem is that those tips are simply crutches, helping when needed to hobble back to Yourself, to gather your attention back in. There are many of them and they only work in specific situations or specific time periods – one day you notice that what worked flawlessly all week suddenly today bam doesn’t work anymore. You kind of remember that you were supposed to go somewhere, to some cozy peace, to some mystical meditation, to extract something from somewhere, but in the midst of stress you can’t reproduce which tool and how you should use it, and the fragments you manage to reproduce don’t help at all.
So every time, during a relatively calm period, with the help of one tool or another, one crutch or another, you manage to hobble to your inner peace, try to memorize that state as deeply as possible, settle into it as if it were your home, so that, when the need or opportunity arises, you simply and naturally recall it and in that same instant return to it without any additional means of assistance. This – is much simpler than each time frantically trying to remember the needed tool or method.
