Mastodon

mackenzian

Keisha E. McKenzie | communication | systems | social good

attention

By

Dying from an inability to say no

a white hand writes with a black ballpoint pen a list on square grid paper. the list is out of focus.
Photo credit: Glenn Carstens Peters

I was going to title this post “Say no so you can say yes,” but I googled the phrase first and found that Zen Habits’ Leo Babauta has already written that thought down.

“We have to clear up some space [in our lives],” Babauta writes, “by saying No to things we’d like to do, but that are taking up space in our lives — space that could be used by something we really really want to do.”

If you’re watching the second half of 2017 jog toward you like a smug Usain Bolt, you might need to create some more room: room to breathe, room to feel, room to reflect, and, yes, room to do.

By June, for instance, I’ll have completed a full year of daily writing and almost-daily posts. I’m creating room for myself by not publishing new content to this website for a month. I’ll return in July with a new schedule.

In the meantime, read Babauta’s article and the Derek Sivers post that inspired him. Consider what they might mean for you, should you apply them to your own life.

By

The meditative routine

A small child in a red hooded jacket carries water on her back. A man in dungarees and a straw hat follows closely behind her.
Photo credit: J Durham via morguefile

Chop wood. Carry water.” —Unknown

Every time you start to feel a little anxious, just put your head down and get to work.” —Janelle Belgrave

One of the things I find fascinating about work that I love is that my love and enjoyment doesn’t cancel out the tedium in the task.

Editing can include painstaking attention to quote marks and commas as much as it allows me to dive into examples and argument logic.

Development can include logging contacts with donors and updating their database records, not just connecting people who have resources with projects worth resourcing.

Research can include tracking quotes to their source and cleaning up references as much as marshaling facts and stories to make a sound point.

Congregational communications can include updating contact lists and making the same documents every few days just as much it includes holding space for people during the joys and challenges of their lives.

There are routines to every role. And even a bucket of water will get heavy if carried for long enough.

But there’s some wisdom in the old saying, “Chop wood. Carry water.” An extended version of this saying ties it to enlightenment or awareness: “Before enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water. After enlightenment, chopping wood and carrying water.”

I’ve learned that even the tedium can be a meditation, that as I do the same thing again and again, I get to notice new things each time. I can focus my attention, and check in with the work rather than check out of it.

That task that is tedious can bring me a kind of calm in my workspace. The repetition is its own order, and reminds me that even grand work depends on small actions, and small actions are worth doing well.

By

Selective attention

Dark room, a bed with light/white bedsheets and comforter.
Photo: Krista Mangulsone (via Unsplash)

According to a recent Fast Company article, selective attention can be a neurological advantage.

‘Glial cells’ are the gardeners of your brain—they act to speed up signals between certain neurons. But other glial cells are the waste removers, pulling up weeds, killing pests, raking up dead leaves. Your brain’s pruning gardeners are called ‘microglial cells.’ They prune your synaptic connections. The question is, how do they know which ones to prune?

Researchers are just starting to unravel this mystery, but what they do know is the synaptic connections that get used less get marked by a protein, C1q (as well as others). When the microglial cells detect that mark, they bond to the protein and destroy—or prune—the synapse.

This is how your brain makes the physical space for you to build new and stronger connections so you can learn more.” —Judah Pollack and Olivia Fox Cabane

A garden in which we don’t both prune and plant is likely to yield weeds.

Pollack and Cabane explain that adults need quality sleep to prune neural connections that aren’t used often: daytime naps and nighttime sleep allow the brain to build the connections it needs and release those it doesn’t.

That’s the biological insight. There’s a psycho-spiritual one as well: be mindful about what you attend to.

“Think about the things that are important to you,” Pollack and Cabane suggest. They offer examples of a person reinforcing feelings of anger and vengeance rather than seeking out ways to complete an important assignment: whichever outcome that person repeatedly focuses on is the outcome their brain will build new connections for. Over time, that outcome will become easier to imagine, and perhaps also easier to create.

There’s a more poetic version of this in the Epistle to the Philippians:

Finally… whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.” —Philippians 4:8

That’s a challenge at times like this, but there’s something intuitively sensible about choosing where to attend, where to focus energy. In her book Reweaving our Human Fabric, Miki Kashtan explores what’s necessary for personal transformation to become widespread social change.

If the neurologists are right, many of us are frittering away energy by failing to rest and by focusing more on what we don’t want than on what we do.

Consider how, even in the face of perpetual violence and other kinds of heartbreaking news, you can intentionally reset your attention on the world you want to live in and the work that’s yours to do to help us all inhabit it.

By

Listening

Photo via Unsplash: a man with climbing gear and a white helmet appears to walk on a high mountain.

The wise are not learned; the learned are not wise.”

“A well-frog cannot imagine the ocean, nor can a summer insect conceive of ice. How then can a scholar understand the Tao? he is restricted by his own learning.”

“‘Lots of people talk to animals,’ Pooh said.
‘Maybe, but…’
‘Not very many listen, though,’ he said.
‘That’s the problem,’ he added.”

–Lao-tse, Chuang-tse, and Pooh Bear via Benjamin Hoff

When we recognize that we need to learn more, and we go out into the world to observe, we then gain the opportunity to listen.

Listening isn’t the filled spaces between speech. It’s the ground that words worth attending to emerge from. The two communities that have held this insight most brightly around me have been unprogrammed Quakers in Texas and Maryland.

Reverence for the context that precedes and supports pronouncements is what allows small and large groups of people to invest an hour at a time in sitting together yet saying nothing and affirming one another in not speaking until compelled to.

The Maryland Quakers have been practicing this for more than 200 years. The Texas Quakers, more than 100. And both groups have helped me inquire for myself:

Where are the spaces in my life where I pause to actively listen rather than assert? What can I learn when I choose to receive, when I pause expression and open up to impression? And, rather than conceiving of listening as not doing something, what happens for me when I perceive it as a gift I first give to myself and then share with the people around me?

It can be especially hard to maintain the listening practice of Sabbath when the majority of the world hums on continuous performance and constant expression. But I treat this time as a reminder to listen, not just in formal community, but also to the natural world, and to my and others’ experience.

As a well-frog or a summer insect, I have to assume that there’s so much more for me to learn. And as the child of a world filled with noise, I have to believe that our attention is precious.

By

Of Circumstance and Action

In the New Year’s Eve reflection I posted last night, there are a few lines that say more about my year than anything else I wrote:

All of that [skill, experience, enthusiasm, potential, will, and grit] I had, but it wasn’t enough to move me forward. Outside of the umbrella of my former university, I was restricted… When the low-grade stress became a scream and I thought I was exhausted, I conferred with a lawyer and started the process of applying for permanent residency independently… [Now] I’m meeting a new year with the ability to move.

A cartoon person on a rocket wooshes across the top of the image. At the bottom, is a period labeled "The Point."
Sometimes our assumptions and premises lead us to miss the point.

Yet I’d always had the ability to move. This ability changed my year, but it wasn’t magically bestowed on me just in time to deflect a crash. I’d always been able to think new thoughts, see new options, test alternatives, fail, and test something different. But I’d allowed my context to overrule my powers of attention and persistence. Over several months, I beat myself against the rock of Circumstance, and so I suffered. But when I started acting so as to shape Circumstance, the restrictions I’d experienced shifted. Not immediately and not all at once, but not a moment before.

Looking back, I’m glad I experienced this, because now I know what doesn’t work.

Throwing oneself at Circumstance but not identifying actions that could shift Circumstance—that doesn’t work.

It’s not that the external restrictions I faced last year weren’t real. They were very legal and very real. But the internal restrictions I faced? Those were unnecessary troubles, and for the months I let them lead me, they limited the options I saw and judged feasible.

Where I Erred

Trained to listen respectfully to authority figures, I took it for granted that they knew what they were talking about. But instead of speaking about me and my case, some spoke about averages—I’m not average—and others spoke from fears and worries that I don’t live by. Not everyone has the expertise to evaluate my experience or potential or risk load, and no one can be as invested in my continued progress as I am. The rules and cautions they offered weren’t about me or for me, but when I accepted them as though they were, I earned the limited perspective that resulted.

At the same time, I was inconsistent about focusing on the future I knew I wanted and taking small, steady steps toward it. I was tempted, every so often, to appease my uncertainty,  to drop my goals and do what others deemed more responsible, or to seat my projects at the kids’ table while I gave over my prime energy to the visions of others. And I was impatient with everything, especially with myself.

Beginning Again

One of my new friends uses the phrase “Begin Again” as a touchstone. I love this phrase!

Photo: In the foreground, a rocky desert landscape with sparse brush; in the background, a pale blue-white morning sky.
Climb the mountain ahead—one step at a time. Image (c) K. McKenzie

In learning the wisdom of the turtle I’m gaining a lot of experiences to retrain the impatience in my blood. My relocation last decade swung me into high, productive activity within the first 3 weeks, but this decade’s relocation is about building deliberately without an institutional safety net. I still have resources and support, but some of the logic and tools I need this time are different than those I used before.

Last week, I read the 1902 pamphlet As a Man Thinketh by James Allen for the first time. I’ve seen it referenced in several books over the years and it’s a classic in more than age: it represents the spirit of its milieu, the US and Europe pre-Titanic and pre-World War I. Those were years in which popular writers and preachers were equally convinced of the power of mind and thought, the science and surety of human progress, and the role of optimism and innovative action in individual and social development. Out of this milieu came Ernest Holmes and the Science of Mind tradition; its contemporary progeny includes a whole swathe of motivational presenters, “life coaches,” and the new trends in “life design.”

During that same period, my denomination emerged as a contrarian voice. As Malcolm Bull and Keith Lockhart argue in Seeking a Sanctuary: Seventh-day Adventism and the American Dream, the SDA tradition countered the spirit of the age with fatalism about human nature and teachings about impending international calamity, not hope for salvation through science and will. With the unmitigated disasters of the 20th Century’s first three decades, Adventist fatalism seemed justified, and its suspicion of progress persists today.

Despite that backdrop, I feel fortunate to have been exposed to some of the mind-thought-goal-action writing men of the late 20th Century, from Norman Vincent Peale and Earl Nightingale to Og Mandino, Zig Ziglar, and Robert Schuller. My mother, who sold encyclopedias and other books when I was small, absorbed the developmental teachings of these writers to help her sell. She also encouraged my siblings and I to reflect on them on our own. I’ll never be a clone of these men and haven’t always applied their approaches, but I looking forward to rediscovering them and testing their validity for myself this year.

And You?

  • Did you join the resolution crowd this morning with a vague intention, or have you set specific and measurable goals for yourself?
  • Have you already figured the actions you need to take to make your goals happen? Who around you is on board with your plan? Check the quality of your social network to minimize peer resistance once you get started.
  • Will success depend on you “hanging in there” with gritted teeth? Or is there a vision that you can return to and be motivated by when the work gets intense?
  • Plan for a little forward motion every day, your stretch target just ahead to help draw you forward at a sustainable pace. Stay in motion.