Thursday

Rapt

For months, I've been meaning to blog about this excellent book: Rapt, Attention and the Focused Life, by Winifred Gallagher. It's full of common-sensical insight, which means, "Observations that most of us probably knew about, but needed someone to point out." Best of all, the insight is backed up by current research.

Excerpts:

"The greatest weapon against stress is out ability to choose one thought or another." (Actually, that's a maxim by William James that she quotes.)

"To enjoy the kind of experience you want rather than enduring the kind that you feel stuck with, you have to take charge of your attention."

"Whenever it's not otherwise occupied, your mind is apt to start scanning for what could be amiss, allowing unpleasant thoughts along the lines of 'I feel fat' or 'Maybe it's malignant' to grab your attention."

"We pay more attention to unpleasant feelings such as fear, anger, and sadness because they're simply more powerful than the agreeable sort."

"The first step toward getting on with your work despite a financial setback or repairing a relationship after a nasty quarrel is to direct--perhaps yank--your attention away from fear or anger toward courage or forgiveness. Thanks to positive emotions' expansive effect on attention, your immediate reward for that effort is not just a more comfortable, satisfying affective state, but also a bigger, better worldview."

(In this passage, she channels concentration-camp survivor Victor Frankl and his logo therapy) Research "confirms that what happens to you, from a blizzard to a pregnancy to a job transfer, is less important to your well-being than how you respond to it."

(And here promotes saint veneration): "You can direct your focus to a certain person in order to influence the way you're currently regarding yourself."

(And here promotes the traditional household with clearly-delineated gender roles): "In a healthy relationship, your work out a lot of things so that you don't have to keep attending to and talking about them."

(Hello Josef Pieper and Leisure, the Basis of Culture): "If you're living focused life, your free time should be justg as generative or even more so. . . Despite the lip service we pay to our treasured leisure, however, it's often unsatisfying, largely because we don't devote it to activities that demand focus and skill."

"Lots of studies show that younger adults pay as much or more attention to negative information as to the positive sort. By middle age, however, their focus starts to shift, until in old age, they're likely to have a strong positive bias in what they both attend to and remember."

I want to put together an essay that compares Ms. Gallagher's insights regarding attention to psychological insight from The Philokalia. There are lots of similarities and parallels, which isn't surprising: modern science is frequently "playing catch up" with spiritual or traditional knowledge. Many commentators say Dostoyevsky was the first modern psychologist. No wonder. He was reared in the tradition of the Greek religious tradition that gave us The Philokalia.

Another insight from Winifred Gallagher: "If most of the time you're not particularly concerned about whether what you're doing is work or play, or even whether you're happy or not, you know you're living the focused life." C.S. Lewis would've loved that observation. Lewis liked the work of a little-known Australian philosopher, Lewis Alexander. Alexander did a lot of work on exploring the difference between enjoying and "enjoying the enjoying." The pure level of enjoyment just takes in and enjoys. The adulterated level of enjoyment sits back and says, "Damn, I'm enjoying this." The latter isn't bad (indeed, it's often a pre-condition to giving thanks), but it's not as pure as simple enjoyment. A child until age seven is virtually incapable of the latter kind of enjoyment, since it requires a level of objectivity that children can't muster psychologically. The child's, then, is always a pure form of enjoyment . . . a verity that I have confirmed over the past seventeen years while watching my own children. That pure type of enjoyment is highly selfless, incidentally, which might be why Christ observed that the Kingdom belongs to those who accept it like children.