Is your life full of distractions, like mine is? I catch myself once in a while, realizing that I’ve spent hours dealing with peripheral personal business while the “real” business of the day waits on the back burner until I can just muster enough mental and emotional energy to eek out what has got to be done.
I click on my email in the morning and I seem to move from one distraction to the next before I get to the main event. And the Internet is notorious for one distraction tumbling after another.
You can intend to do a simple Google search for something that matters to you and off you go. If it’s not click-bait on your Google feed or Facebook feed, Instagram or Twitter, it’s legitimate movement from one bit of “research,” that leads to another bit or bob that leads to yet another, until you nearly forget about your original point of interest.
Click-bait is essentially internet advertising masked as information, or gossip about celebrities and their secrets to success. Most of us, out of curiosity, click on it at some time or another. Someone once said that advertising is 48% distraction, 48% manipulation, and 4% information. They got that right.
Distraction is a matter of contemporary culture, offering information overload from politics, to entertainment all around the globe, to cute kitties, dogs, babies, weddings, sales pitches, and gossip. It’s nearly impossible to stay focused on what’s important, when distractions, even worthy ones compete for your attention.
The lyrics to a song called, Breathe 2 a.m., by Dido, which is included on my jogging track, speaks to those daily distractions which are a major part of our modern lives. “…you can’t jump the track we’re like cars on a cable and life’s like an hour glass glued to the table; no one can find the rewind button now, so cradle your head in your hands and breathe, just breathe, oh breathe, just breathe.”
I think, poignant to the song, Breathe, is that the artist sings whole sections without taking a breath. It seems that our culture, like that song, is about movement from one thing to the next, with barely a moment to take a single breath.
I need one extra long breath some days when dealing with all those distractions. It’s peculiar that when I’m doing my own thing, stuff goes swimmingly. But the other things that I’m stuck doing because of somebody else’s mistakes, minute by minute, hour by hour, suck the smooth right out of some, or if I’m honest, most days.
Don’t even try to fix their errors by yourself online because there are safeguards built into the system so that if you don’t go with their program, they bounce your bum right off the website. Then you attempt via the old-fashioned telephone, to first explain the mistake to a human being, once you’ve swum through the morass of selections laid out before you.
After you’ve explained the situation to the first person, chances are you’ll be forwarded to another department or if you’re lucky, their manager or supervisor. Then when you ask if the manager is aware of your issue and/or if they have your account number in front of them, they give you the duh-silent treatment and you have to go over it all again.
Meanwhile your distraction-meter is ticking up to the red-overload zone. Okay, so now you have the supervisor on the telephone and you’ve repeated your issue. You have hope that this person is qualified to settle the matter and this distraction will be over for today.
“I’ll have to research this and get back to you,” they say. “Is this the best number to reach you?” Day one passes as does days two and three. Meanwhile the bill is due tomorrow, but the mistake on the bill has not been resolved.
That in itself presents another issue, that of confirming your identity. Oh my, this might be “driving me to distraction.”
It seems time to re-set, re-boot and re-focus. If one prevails, the distractions eventually wane and you get to do what you intended to do all along. So, I guess the best antidote to distraction is a matter of the old stick-to-it-rive-ness. Perseverance will get the job done every time.
Besides information overload, emotional or physical messes create distraction, which reduces your power to concentrate on the bigger picture. You can as easily get trapped in cleaning up a mess as a fly gets caught in a spider’s web.
Cleaning up this particular mess reminds you of another mess, and in the midst of that mess is yet another reminder that something else needs tidying, until you’re truly lost in messes. This is what T.S. Eliot meant when he said, “Distracted by distraction by distraction.”
Another phenomenal distraction is loss. If you’ve lost something or someone, have you noticed that you have a reduced ability to focus on much of anything else?
Then there is the “wonderful distraction.” When your mind is overfilled, distractions can be a positive trick to unloading and diverting traffic to a happier highway, so to speak.
If problems threaten to overwhelm you, any distraction will provide blessed relief. The problem may not go away; then again, a bit of time away from it all may allow the issue to fix itself. I’ve observed that making allowances for distraction is doing yourself a great service of self-care.
But, on the other side of the double-edged sword of distraction, I totally see Thomas Edison’s point when he said, “To do much clear thinking a person must arrange for regular periods of solitude when they can concentrate and indulge the imagination without distraction.”
Distractions are here to stay, folks. So make the best of them and think on these things: truth, nobility, justice, purity, love, good reports, virtuousness, and anything that is worthy of praise – see Philippians 4:8-18.