Driven by Distraction

In the middle of the second half of Cerebus volumes, I put down the comic book and picked up Sarah Vowell. I read The Partly Cloudy Patriot while I slogged through Guys and Rick's Story and Going Home -- but I didn't do it because I was sick of Cerebus. I did it because that's what I do.

Focusing on essays about patriotism somehow helped me to focus on comic books about aardvarks. I don't know how or why it works. It just does.

Maybe I was built for the petite seven-course meal rather than the smorgasbord -- ironic, since I'm Swedish -- but that implies that I've been lying with all this "I learn through obsession" stuff. And I don't think I have been.

It's just that one of my obsessions appears to be multi-tasking.

I found, sophomore year in college, that I wasn't able to focus as well as I used to. I suspected that I had peaked in high school, which is a terrible thing to think. I wouldn't wish it on anybody.

I was distracted in class, distracted from studying in my bedroom, distracted by small whims quickly snowballing into elaborate daydreams. I consulted "my lady" -- my on-campus counselor.

"Are you having trouble getting your work done?" she asked.

"Well, no," I said, confused. Of course I was getting my work done. "I just feel like I'm slipping, like I can't focus like I used to."

I lowered my voice and admitted painfully, confessionally: "I'm worried I'm getting stupider."

To her credit, my counselor didn't laugh. Instead, she suggested that maybe I was having the opposite problem -- that maybe my brain wasn't engaged enough in the tasks set before me because too much of my attention was left unused. Maybe what I was trying to focus on wasn't enough anymore.

It was a revelation.

I solved the problem first semester sophomore year by eating peanuts while I studied. The automatic motion of my arm and the chewing and swallowing seemed to provide enough focus for the rest of my brain to allow the thinking parts to concentrate. I solved the problem second semester by getting involved in a series of overwhelming personal crises.

The personal crises worked well beyond expectations.

Since then, I've been on the two-year cycle I mentioned in my first carte blanche answer post -- two years of boring, neutral info-gathering followed by one year of intense application and engagement.

The engagement, I think, comes from distraction.

I am pro-distraction.

I am for setting aside work that really needs to get done for work you really want to do right now. I'm for spending time washing dishes when I'm on deadline; for going to the circus when I should be sleeping; for dishing with friends when I should be applying to grad school. I am for using distractions when I would otherwise be bored to tears, and for knowingly applying distractions to my life when I suspect I may be approaching boredom.

Distraction as boredom prevention, that's my motto. (Pretty boring motto -- but look over here!)

But not only distraction to ease time passing -- distraction to create possibilities that wouldn't have existed before. Distraction to help me see peripherally what I couldn't have seen directly. Distraction to highlight connections between disparate actions and ideas; distraction to get me out of myself and into the world.

Maybe the watched-pot theory of time isn't a theory of time at all. Maybe it's a theory of mass and energy. Maybe it's not that the pot will seem like it's taking forever to boil -- maybe it really never will. Maybe applying ourselves to tasks not only makes them seem harder; maybe it makes them impossible.

Writing is like this. Finding a new friend is like this. Life, I suspect, is like this.

So in the middle of my second Sarah Vowell book, I set her and the assassination of President Garfield aside, and read some Alfred Bester.

I suspect Sarah, Al and I are all better off for it.