When it is time for you to sit down and poop, what do you do? Do you experience the pooping (perhaps it will be a bit painful today, or perhaps it will feel quite good), or do you pick up a Yoga magazine or some book and distract yourself while you’re pooping?
When it is time for you to eat food, what do you do? Do you taste the food and feel the textures, or do you talk to people or travel in incessant mental circles as you re-live your day?
When it is time to drive, what do you do? Do you drive your car (when you were a child, you would have thought this was a pretty neat thing to do), or do you play the radio to distract yourself from the experience of driving?
When you are near someone whom you claim to love, what do you do? Do you give them your full attention and the passion of your emotions, or do you talk about meaningless things (‘the boss yelled at me again today’) and go on and on about your own insecurities and problems (‘do you think I look pretty in this dress’)?
Pooping, you see, is quite a miraculous experience. When someday you can’t poop, or can’t control your pooping, you might wonder why you never took the time, just once in your life, to really pay attention to what pooping was like. When you can’t eat wonderful foods any more, you may wonder why you didn’t take the time to relish some of the food you ate. When your driver’s license is taken away, you may wonder why you never noticed how fun driving was. And when your loved one dies, you may wonder why you spent most of your time with them in a perpetual state of distraction – which wasn’t really time spent with them at all.
Life will provide plenty of distractions like this. If you like, it will readily provide you with a whole life-time of distractions. You can go through almost your whole existence in a constant state of listening to music, watching TV, taking drugs to remove pain or emotion, reading books, and making yourself very busy. In the few moments when you are not engaged in such major distractions, you will find that your mind has become so hyper from all these activities that now you are constantly thinking. Even if you stop and sit down, your mind is running off into other places, so that never, for one moment, do most of us experience anything but our mind’s galloping around and our culture’s constant infusion of stimuli. Today, with cell phones and ipods, we can bring our distraction everywhere. Even most backpackers carry a cell phone!
When we read this, we may feel that we need to make a change. We may toss out all the magazines we keep by the toilet, or if we are really aggressive, we may take a screwdriver and remove the radio and cd player from our car.
But you do not have to try to make an effort to change these things. You will not eradicate distraction in this way. You will only give power to your fear of distraction. Distraction is all around us all the time. If we run away from it by trying to create an environment where there is no distraction, what are we doing?
Your effort will become another kind of distraction, and once again you will be missing out on the beauty of your meal as you think to yourself – this is good, I am paying attention to my eating, and now my life will gain clarity and I will become a better person. It is so good not to be distracted!
You are an intelligent person. You do not need to be told what to do about distraction. All you need to do is notice, for yourself, how you are living your life. Pay attention to a single day, and watch how hungrily you devour distraction. Feel the feelings it gives you.
Experience the distraction.
Try this for a day here, a day there. You will notice how you are spending your life. You may discover, when you pay attention to the distractions, how dull they really are, especially compared to the richness of experience they are distracting you from. Your own intelligence, after that, will move you to find a new relationship with distraction.
All you need to do is pay a little attention.
Kenton,
I have find it intriguing how those who are informed that they have a terminal illness often find great peace. After burning through the stages of grief, the denial, bargaining, anger and finally acceptance, all the weight of living is suddenly lifted. All the distractions no longer have power and relationships become the chief focus of the final days. Love and peace are finally experienced to the fullest and I have heard people express regret in that it took so long to realize the “truth” about life.
As an aside, I do recall times on the hopper when I have remarked to myself, “wouldn’t it be funny if I were to attain enlightenment during this bowel movement.” Thanks to your post it no longer seems funny anymore and, in fact, I greatly anticipate the morning “movement.”LOL!
Good Post!
mike S
Hi, Kenton –
These comments from this entry:
“You may discover, when you pay attention to the distractions, how dull they really are, especially compared to the richness of experience they are distracting you from.”
are my favorite.
It is so true. I suppose the famous John Lennon quote could be modified to say…Life is what happens when you are being distracted.
Thanks as always for some enlightening words. (for the poop on pooping if you will) : ) Now, if we can only live like we are dying.
~Jerry
Greetings Jerry,
Yes, it’s an amazing discovery! Difficult to believe when we’re surrounded by such tempting offerings as X-Boxes, ever-more-visually stimulating movies, and cell phones. But even something as simple as taking a single step can be so amazing.
As always, thanks for your words =)
Fondly,
Kenton
I don’t mean to sound rude, but this is just another distraction. Being online long enough to come upon your website translates into missing out on some of the many experiences life has to offer. Really, what you’re saying and what you want are conflicted. You seem to be warning people about the various distractions in their life, but if they start to stray away from them (the internet being one) then you lose your fan-base.
Just a funny, poorly worded thought.
P.S. Please forgive that this thought is so poorly worded. My vocabulary is failing me horribly today.
Greetings Nathan,
Thanks for your comment. The tricky thing you notice here is that it’s easy for us to get into the game of deciding that activity A is a good, non-distracted activity (like sitting under a tree and watching the birds), and that B is a bad, distracted activity (like watching TV or surfing the net). And yet, the point of awareness is not to divide the world into these sorts of divisions, but rather to bring our awareness into everything we do. We can experience the fullness of life while surfing the net just as effectively as we when we’re sitting under that tree. The difference? Activities such as the surfing the net or watching TV can much more easily create the feeling of ‘disattachment’ which we often feel is robbing us of the experience of life.
Our awareness, if we allow it to be aware, is capable of embracing all of life’s experience, whether we’re watching a movie, climbing a tree, or dying of cancer. It’s just that we’re so often surrounded by civilization that it has a way of lulling us into routine, while nature is so novel for most of us that it can often deliver a swift and clear sense of ‘now’.
Your wording was just fine, by the way.
Sweetwater,
Kenton
I believe that the greatest compliment I can give this article is that it has inspired me to close my computer now and look outside.
Yes!
=)
Kenton
While doing this, do not think _too_ much.
Instead of thinking about p., you could begin thinking about thinking about p.
This will appear to you as deeply philosophical and for a while it will be good. But after your p. is over and you realize that nothing has been learned, this feeling too fades.
At this point you must then admit that it is not you who is thinking, but that it _is being thought_ inside of you (Nietzsche). And all you need to do is to provide yourself with distractions, novel ones, that have not distracted you before, like pooping, like philosophy.
Greetings dejj,
My challenge to you would be to sit down, examine your mind’s workings, and see if you can discover this sensation of ‘being thought inside of you’. Our thought-forms seem layered, and they seem to source from somewhere, but never can we find anything except our bare perceptions. Even the idea of ‘inside of us’ must be challenged if we are going to look without applying belief.
If we utilize belief, then we can create a whole array of stories. But what do we discover when we examine each and every belief, and attend to the only true evidence we have? What then do we discover?
Sweetwater,
Kenton