Awareness and Focus

Focusing is stressing on one thing and conversely stress arrives out of incessant focus on one thing. We are told time and again to focus and not be distracted, that there is always only focus or distraction, not awareness.

If focus is like a pin that pricks, awareness is a pin-screen. Awareness is the art of giving distributed importance to the happenings of life in the moment. There is thought happening always, yes, but there is also the bird singing in the window, a quiet gentle breeze from the ceiling fan, smell of a perfume wafting from a passerby - they too are present.

In our heavy handed importance to focus we have created a stressful life and a stressful society. We are extremely domain dependent and fail to connect our knowledge in one discipline to have inter-disciplinary uses and interactions in finding broader solutions. We are blinded by focus.

The specializations worshipped in the industrial age have left a specialized, isolated mind in an isolated society. When we think of taking breaks we again focus on another thing while isolating everything around us. When nothing that we focus on holds our interest we rapidly jump from one subject of focus to the other hoping it will fill our parched void.

It is our heightened focus on one thing and elimination of everything else that keeps our mind hopelessly stuck. Regurgitating the same old information, trying to come up with a solution, only ends up generating worry and anxiety.

Every creation that is unique can in some way be traced back to awareness and observation, not focus. Creative geniuses of every kind be it in science, art or business are great observers of the happenings around them. By observation and awareness they find their inspiration, they cannot afford to be blinded by focus. Execution of ideas might benefit from focus but the genesis of any creative pursuit is always rooted in awareness.

Earning and Spending Time

When we are fixated on buying tools that promise to enhance life, we expend the finite time we earn onto objects. As objects depreciate and die out waiting for us to use them fully, so does the time we earn in life.

Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now - that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you'll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order. And that therefore you had better stop postponing the 'real meaning' of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life now. -- Oliver Burkeman

Time is transactory. Time spent in our professions is exchanged for money and money, beyond the basic safeguards (health, security, etc.), can provide only two things:

- it can change the quality of time one spends

- it can give more time for a person to live aspects of life other than profession.

Time spent in professions, thus becomes, an investment to access more free time or improve one's quality of time in life.

Our obsession of earning quality time in the future blinds us from seeing that the time we are spending right now is what we had earned (and yearned) yesterday.

It is of very little use to us to be able to control and plan the future unless we are capable, at the same time of living totally in the present - Alan Watts

The only two things that can be bought with our time i.e. improving our quality of time in this life or adding more free time to our life, both are often squandered by our excessive focus on material belongings.

Fifteen days of what could have been lifechanging experiences - that you sacrificed by working for money - might only amount to a TV that is adorning your room, gaping at you with its large black mouth, as you whittle away at spreadsheets.

The seldomly used TV, the car that leaves your garage once a month, the obligatory expenditure you made to satisfy someone, are not signs of pride or duty but are signs of not living.

Your own unique style

It wasn't until very recently that the full impact of what Wim Wenders said in his advice to young creators hit me:

"Don't do anything that somebody else, that you know deep in your heart, can do better. Do what nobody else can do except for you." - Wim Wenders

This back in time hit me as very prohibitive. Is he saying we should not explore all the things that we are interested in? I pretty much dismissed the idea at the time as one important part of what Wim says was missing. How do you know you can or cannot do something better than anyone else?

Endeavors are after all journeys into the wilderness, they are not akin to taking the fastest train to the next station.

A few years later while trying to understand what vocal training looks like I came across this video to 'find your own voice'. The trainer Ramsey notes that everyone feels that:

"I don't like the way that my voice sounds, I just want to sound like my favorite singer" -Ramsey Sound Studio

The entire problem with developing your own style or your own voice starts here. The beginners problem is that we donot like our own voice and our own style, in knowing what the art that we like is capable of we are hooked to the masters that are performing it.

Pain is the primer. Just as in singing songs that you are not built for, (lose yourself trying to sing Bryan Adams or Pavarotti for example) there is considerable pain in pushing your abilities in zones you cannot keep up for long.

There is no play that you can imagine in such situations, everything is just hard and you have to be 'serious' about it. But creative acts are possible only in play. As Stephen King writes in his book 'On Writing':

“Writing is at its best— always, always, always— when it is a kind of inspired play for the writer. I can write in cold blood if I have to, but I like it best when it’s fresh and almost too hot to handle.” - Stephen King

We can only play when we are well within the abilities of our craft. Almost on the verge of boredom too probably, because creativity really does arise from boredom after all. You push yourself not to achieve some external goal but to relieve yourself from internal boredom Thats what children play for too.

Coming back to Wim's words again, "Do what nobody else can do except for you". What are those things?

Those are things that you are not straining on to keep up but are running ahead with. The abilities you have accumulated to use and use. And when you are bored, to use in playful and mischievous ways that keep yourself interested in it.

“I’m always ‘working.’ It looks like work to others, but it feels like play to me. And that’s how I know no one can compete with me on it. Because I’m just playing, for sixteen hours a day. If others want to compete with me, they’re going to work, and they’re going to lose because they’re not going to do it for sixteen hours a day, seven days a week.” - Naval Ravikant

And when you know you are doing it, you also know that you are very close to doing it better than anyone else.